Deacon King Kong

“As the weather-beaten Staten Island Ferry eased across the harbor, Sister Gee stood on the deck, glancing at the Cause Houses disappearing in the distance, and at the Statue of Liberty floating by on the right, then mused as a seagull rode the wind near her, skimming the water at eye level, gliding effortlessly alongside the deck before pulling away and rising.” James McBride, “Deacon King Kong” (2020)

The tragicomic novel, recommended to me by high school classmate Gaard Murphy Logan, begins in a South Brooklyn housing project reminiscent of the author’s childhood home, documented in James McBride’s 1995 memoir “The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother.” McBride's father was a Black minister, his mother a Polish immigrant. On a cloudy afternoon in September of 1969, Sportcoat, a drunken, superannuated Five Ends Baptist Church deacon, shoots 19-year-old drug dealer Deems Clemons, formerly the star pitcher on a team he’d coached. Throughout the book Sportcoat, also called Deacon King Kong, referring to the powerful home brew he favored, manages to elude inept Italian mobsters’ hitmen.

The Black and Puerto Rican residents of the Causeway Housing Projects, built originally for the families of Italian dock workers and located in sight of the Statue of Liberty (“a gigantic copper reminder that this city was a grinding factory that diced the poor man’s dreams worse than any cotton gin or sugarcane factory from the old country”), had little reason for hope; some found comfort in religion, others in artificial stimulants - or depressants. Here’s McBride’s description of Life in the Cause:

You worked, slaved, fought off the rats, the mice, the roaches, the ants, the Housing Authority, the cops, the muggers, and now the drug dealers. You lived a life of disappointment and suffering, of too-hot summers and too-cold winters, surviving in apartments with crummy stoves that didn’t work and windows that didn’t open and toilets that didn’t flush and lead paint that flecked off the walls and poisoned your children.

Even so, as NPR reviewer declared, McBride, National Book Award winner for "The Good Lord Bird," "entertains us and show us both the beauty and ugliness of humanity.” He describes the Cause residents compassionately as flawed but sympathetic, with common sense coping skills and apt nicknames such as Bum-Bum, Lightbulb, Soup, and Hot Sausage. Sportcoat describes a day’s drinking as going “from a toot to a tear to a wallbanger.” His friend Hot Sausage admonishes him, “Your cheese done fell off your cracker” and describes an aging beauty as one whom he wouldn’t throw out of bed for eating crackers. Until interrupted by a power failure, they argue about the best way of breaking mojos:

“Put a fork under your pillow and buckets of water around your kitchen.”

“Roll a hound’s tooth in cornmeal and wear it around your neck.”

“Naw. Walk up a hill with your hands behind your head.”

“Stick your hand in a jar of maple syrup.”

“Sprinkle seed corn and butter bean hulls outside the door.”

“Step backward over a pole ten times.”

“Swallow three pebbles.”

“Never turn your head to the side when a horse is passing.”

“Drop a dead mouse on a red rag.”

“Give your sweetheart an umbrella on the Thursday”

“Blow on a mirror and walk it around a tree ten times.”

Long after I’ve forgotten the plot devices of “Deacon King Kong,” I’ll remember the strength and motherwit of characters such as Sister Veronica Gee, who felt a bond with soon-to-retire honest Irish cop “Potts” Mullen; or Sportcoat himself (real name Cuffy Lampkin), who gardened for an ancient Italian lady he nicknamed Miss Four Pies and escorted her on hunts for pokeweed and other folk medicine remedies. Then there were the wonderful character sketches of residents such as Little Soup Lopez, who at age 14 switches from watching “Captain Kangaroo,” a “children’s show about a gentle white man whose gags with puppets and characters like Mr. Mouse and Mr. Green Jeans [once] delighted him” to “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood,” about “a gentle white man with better puppets.”

Football great Gerald Irons, RIP

 

“Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.” Seneca

 

 

Ten-year NFL veteran linebacker Gerald D. Irons passed away recently from complications brought on by Parkinson’s Disease.  He grew up in Gary and graduated from Roosevelt High School in 1966.  In those days Roosevelt had an abysmal football team, going 2-13-1 his final two years, the only wins coming against doormat Horace Mann and twice losing to city champ Lew Wallace by over 30 points. Irons also played basketball for Roosevelt and was just one of two juniors (the other being Chuck Hughes, CEO of the Gary Chamber of Commerce) on a 1965 squad that, led by Don Crudup and Dolph Pulliam, advanced to the state semi-finals before getting upset by Fort Wayne North.  Hughes recently told Gary Crusader reporter David Denson, “I knew his work ethic.  We’d be in the locker room, and he said what he was going to do and that was to make the pros, and he dedicated himself to making that happen.”

 

Irons graduated from the University of Maryland Eastern Shore, where he not only starred in football but was a topnotch student and leader in student government.  Drafted by Cleveland, he played for the Browns for six years and for the Oakland Raiders for four seasons.  Irons was on the field in December of 1972 when the Pittsburgh Steelers pulled off what many believe was the greatest play of all time, the so-called Immaculate Reception. In the final minute of the AFL championship, Terry Bradshaw attempted a pass to John Fuqua. The referees ruled that the ball bounced off Raider Jack Tatum’s helmet and into the hands of Steeler Franco Harris, who galloped for the winning touchdown. Some Raiders, branding the play the “Immaculate Deception,” claimed the ball ricocheted off Fuqua and may have touched the ground, there rendering it an incomplete pass. Most experts disagree.

 

During his playing career Irons completed an MBA at the University of Chicago and took courses at John Marshall Law School.  In retirement his family moved to Woodlands, Texas, and he began a 32-year career with a development company that was a subsidiary of Howard Hughes Corporation.  With wife Myrna he co-authored a motivational book titled “When Preparation Meets Opportunity.” Amending Roman philosopher Seneca’s maxim, he claimed that success was what resulted when preparation meets opportunity.  In motivational speeches Irons also advised: “You are not a product of your circumstances. You are a product of your decisions.” 

Chesterton Flag Removal Protest

“I clapped and I cried and I was so proud of these children who recognize the disparity and the marginalized communities that some of them belong to and some see themselves as allies of.” Laura Madigan, Chesterton parent

At Chesterton Middle School administrators forced three teachers to take down posters and flags representing Pride, Black Lives Matter, diversity, and so-called gay supportive material after a few parents complained that it made their children uncomfortable. Caving in to the pressure, Principal Mike Hamacher justified the decision by claiming that the items were not directly related to the curriculum and that they constituted “a disruption to the learning environment.” Approximately 30 students staged a 20-minute walk-out in protest. Monday afternoon, over a hundred concerned citizens rallied at Chesterton Park to register their outrage, including Toni, and Tom and Darcey Wade. Duneland School Board, which was meeting at the time, refused to put the issue on the agenda but allowed a few parents to address them afterwards. The protest was covered by Chicago TV stations and was the main front-page story in Tuesday’s April 13 NWI Times.

Milissa Beale told Times reporters Bob Kasarda and Mary Freda that her 13-year-old daughter Mila came home deflated Friday and asked if it meant she wasn’t wanted at school. Jennifer Camacho said: “It is a human right for my child to go to school and not have to be worried about being grabbed or called the F-word.” She added, “Put the flag back up. It’s not exclusive, it’s inclusive.” Lily Rex said, “I know from lived experience that visibility saves lives. Open dialogue, silent shows of solidarity, like a Black Lives Matter flag on the wall, can save lives, and at the same time they don’t hurt anyone.”

Indicating that Chesterton administrators were backward-looking and out of step with changing times, English teacher Hilda Demuth-Lutze held a gay awareness poster that she told the Times staff writers was the subject of controversy 25 years ago. In 1997 high school instructor Bonney Leckie had been ordered to remove it from her classroom wall and appealed to the school board. After the board ruled in her favor, Demuth-Lutze recalled Leckie telling them, “The poster won’t be put back up in my classroom tomorrow, it will be tonight.” Demuth-Lutze added: “She said she doesn’t just teach English. She teaches young people to be good citizens and good neighbors. And that, in my opinion, is what education is all about.”

The rainbow-colored Pride Flag symbol being censored is one that has adorned my recent Steel Shavings issues and that I wear on a vest when in the classroom. Designed by gay activist Gilbert Parker, whose colors symbolize life (red), light (yellow), nature (green), serenity (blue), spirit (violet), and healing (orange), plus, when pink is used, love, it reminds me of the rainbow coalition of the 1980s, those discriminated against, such as former IUN professor Anne Balay, for being openly gay, and, as one sign put in at the rally, that “Love Is Love.”

Talking Heads

“This ain’t no party, this ain’t no disco

This ain’t no fooling around

This ain’t no Mudd Club, no C.B.G.B.’s

I ain’t got time for that now.”

    Talking Heads, “Life during Wartime”

 

I listened to a CBGB OMFUG tribute CD that contained the Talking Heads classic “Life during Wartime,” which contained the line ”No time for dancing, or lovey dovey,” from the band’s “Fear of Music” album. Opening in 1973 in New York City’s East Village, the club’s founder Hilly Kristal used initials standing for “Country, Bluegrass, Blues, and Other Uplifting Gormandizers (voracious consumers).  Rather seedy, CBGBs came to be renown as one of the birthplaces for punk, with house bands such as the Ramones, Television, Patti Smith, Blondie, and Talking Heads, led by frenetic David Byrne, whose first hit was “Psycho Killer.”

 

In a New York Review essay titled “This Ain’t No Disco” Dan Chiasson wrote:

    The constructed family called Talking Heads was a band led by a couple, with a strange, alienated man-child at the microphone.  The Ramones, their friends and touring partners, were a family all right but in comic-nightmare form: a feral, sniping brood, a nest of eels.  [Chris] Frantz, Byrne, [Tina] Weymouth, on the other hand, spruced up the dangerous commercial loft where they lived together on Chrystie Street with rattan furniture from Frantz’s parents’ porch.

 

Byrne wrote “Life during Wartime” in 1979 and later claimed it was about Baader-Meinhof, Patty Hearst, Tompkins Square, and living in Alphabet City.  Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof were part of a terrorist anti-American West German gang who were both killed while in custody (authorities claimed Mainhof’s death was a suicide). Patty Hearst was kidnapped in 1974 by Symbionese Liberation Army radicals and was either forced or brainwashed into participating in robberies for which she served seven years in prison. Tompkins Square was located in the East Village, with avenues named A, B, C, and D.

 

Several years ago, Miller mainstays George Rogge and Gene Ayers arranged for the classic 1984 documentary “Stop Making Sense” to be shown at Gardner Center. It opens with Byrne alone on a stage with a cassette player.  He begins singing “Psycho Killer” and is later joined by fellow band members and finally several other musicians and singers, who follow with “Burning Down the House.” During the film Byrne appears in an absurdly huge business suit, at which time Rogge darts out in similar apparel and does a spectacular imitation of Byrne’s gyrations.  Unforgettable.

Valpo U Martin Luther King Day

 “The point of Black Lives Matter is that all lives matter.” Molefi Kete Assante

When I heard that Valparaiso University professors Liz Wuerffel and Allison Schuette were hosting a zoom session during the belated Martin Luther King Day commemorating the tenth anniversary of the Welcome Project, I obtained a link to the day’s events, which included a round table on diversity in the workplace and a keynote by distinguished scholar Molefi Kete Asante. The day’s theme was “Lessons from the Movement.”

Leading off was a Welcome from President Jose D. Padilla, who noted that his grandfather received dirty looks when he entered a Texas restaurant because of his Mexican heritage, his mother’s family were migrant workers and that his father quit school, later earned a GED, and finished his career as a high school principal. He noted that he was a beneficiary of affirmative action, which allowed him to obtain a law degree from the University of Michigan. He mentioned that Inez Parker (class of 1951) was the first African-American VU graduate and that VU faculty were an integral part of the movement during the late 1960s desegregate what had been, in effect, a “Sundown City” banning Blacks after dark.

Padilla introduced taped excerpts from a 1967 speech by Martin Luther King, where he talked about the early phase of the civil rights movement emphasizing basic decency issues such as the right to be served at a lunch counter or exercise the vote and that the struggle had shifted to a struggle for true equality, including economic opportunity. He concluded that most whites were content to work for “equality on the installment plan” and that there was vacillation and ambivalence about true equality. The white backlash civil rights activist was facing in the North was nothing new, he declared, and had precedents in American history, including after the Civil War.

Prior to the keynote speech, I learned that 78-year-old Molefi Kete Asante was a leading proponent of Afrocentricity (a word he evidently coined), the author or editor of over 70 books and 400 articles, and was chair of Temple University’s Department of Africology and African-American Studies. I half-expected Asante to be an ideologue and critic of King’s integrationist philosophy. Instead, he was scholarly, nondoctrinaire, and truly impressive, talking apparently without notes, beginning with a personal history. Born Arthur Lee Smith, Jr., one of 16 children, he grew up in Valdosta, Georgia, in a family of cotton and tobacco pickers. Encouraged to read by an aunt, he was able to attend Nashville Christian Institute and in 1960 was involved in sit-ins that took place in 1960, organized by Fisk University Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee activists such as Diane Nash and John Lewis. He graduated from Oklahoma Christian College in 1964 and earned a PhD from UCLA in 1968.

Calling himself a child of the 1960s, Asante noted that the murder of Emmett Smith traumatized him and that in 19 years of schooling he learned practically nothing about the history of Africa or African-American history and culture. For instance, he grew up learning the poetry of Langston Hughes but found none of his work in literature anthologies. He speculated that for Inez Parker, VU’s first Black graduate, the situation was similar. After helping launch a Black Studies program at UCLA, he was hired as a full professor at SUNY Buffalo. Around this time, he decided to replace his so-called slave name with an African tribal name meaning “One who gives and keeps the traditions.”

Asante’s main purpose was to discuss race within the framework of hierarchy and patriarchy. He asserted that social scientists are in agreement that race is a social construction, that biologically, there is only one race, homo sapiens, that emerged in Africa approximately 300,000 years ago. For most of that time, all human beings, adapting well to their environment, lived in Africa and were hunters and gatherers. In time many different cultures emerged but not difference in intelligence. Race was a social construct and, thus, hierarchy based on race was a human control used as a means of social control. What is necessary to live up to the ideal of equality is to get out of the racial paradigm. Therefore, difference should be embraced but without ranking. In fact, like Dr. King, Asante advocated embracing a common quest for pluralism.

Three days later, Saturday Evening Club (SEC) speaker John Crayton, a psychiatrist, ably summarized Shoshana Zuboff’s “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism,” as well as a January 29, 2021 New York Times column by the author entitled “The Coup We Are Not Talking About.” He began with a frustrating personal experience as organizer of a Michigan City classical musical program scheduled for YouTube due to the pandemic. Sony Records claimed copyright infringement after a bot erroneously tagged their effort. Crayton asserted that big tech companies are surreptitiously collecting data from electronic devices such as smart phones, Alexa speakers, Google, Facebook, and even rectal thermometers. Listing ominous consequences of “rogue capitalists” monitoring our activities, one that resonated with me was “a splintered shared authority,” the result of extremist sites being the sole source of “news” for increasing segments of the population.

Many of the 16 SEC members tuned in via zoom expressed their uneasiness over the methods of tech companies. The situation reminded financial adviser Doug Watkins of George Orwell’s “1984.” Hugh McGuigan, former director of VU’s international studies program, recalled working for a secret government agency as a Russian linguist during the Cold War and noted that there was an uptick of governmental surveillance in the aftermath of the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center. Someone had a grandchild nicknamed Alexa and joked that he needed to turn off his device whenever she visited. Stewart McMillan, CEO of Task Force Tips, a company that designs and manufactures firefighting equipment, thought it hypocritical for people to bemoan the potential harm of the very devices that they use daily. No one if forced to use a smart phone or join Facebook, he said, concluding, “If you don’t like it, just tune out.”

I thanked Crayton for a provocative talk and, tongue in cheek, for warning me about smart rectal thermometers. I acknowledge the many benefits of Google, Facebook, and other modern devices and admitted I didn’t find their intrusive nature especially worrisome. What would alarm me is if the government-controlled tech companies and controlled their output or used their data to repress dissent. Since my remarks were brief and most members were Valpo residents, I praised VU’s Martin Luther King Day events, which included autobiographical remarks by Mexican-American president Jose Padilla, a documentary (“From Sunrise to Sunset”) about efforts to end segregation in Valparaiso, and a keynote by Molefi Kete Asante, an proponent of Afrocentricity. As one who participated in sit-ins and demonstrations during the 1960s, I’m certain that, like Martin Luther King himself, Asante came under FBI surveillance. I did, too, for protesting the Vietnam War. I’d hate to see a return to those days of government officials snooping into people’s private lives for evidence of disloyalty. I found it comforting that the FBI and other intelligence gathering agencies didn’t kowtow to Trump’s efforts to politicize them. Still, citizens cannot be complacent. Aldous Huxley’s dystopian novel “Brave new World” is a reminder that we must remain vigilant.

Political Prisoner Kathryn Hyndman

“My father [coalminer Andria Erlich] was an undemonstrative man, but the night in 1929 when I came home and told him I had joined the Communist Party, he took me in his arms and danced around the dining room table, tears of happiness in his eyes.”

In its Winter 2006 issue Traces magazine published my article “Triumph over Travail: The Kathryn Hyndman Story.” It began: “On October 7, 1952, two agents of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service arrested 45-year-old Kathryn Hyndman in her Gary home. The agents took her to the Crown Point jail, where she was incarcerated for nearly ten months in a cell blocks with prostitutes, drug addicts, and murderers. Two years before, over President Harry Truman’s veto, Congress had passed the McCarran Internal Security Act, which called for the deportation of alien subversives. The wife of a Gary steelworker, Hyndman had immigrated to America at the age of five from Croatia and had joined the Communist Party, following in her father’s tradition. Her criminal record for coming to the aid of a black woman and three children in Chicago who had been evicted and whose possessions she had spotted on the street proved an insurmountable obstacle in her subsequent efforts to become an American citizen.”

 

On Wednesday I received this email from Bill Pratt:

    I am a retired history professor [from the University of Nebraska at Omaha] who has been researching the CP and farmers for years. Katherine Erlich was sent to District 10, which covered about that many states (including Nebraska) as district organizer in 1932. Tonight I came across a reference to Katherine Hyndman and learned that you had written an article on her. Obviously, I would like to see this article, but if sending me a copy of it is inconvenient, if you would provide a citation, I will try to obtain it through inter-library loan. The deportation of Communists (often former Communists) is an overlooked topic, but a relevant issue today in regard to how immigrants are treated. I don’t think very many people have any idea what happened to the IWO (International Workers Order) and its affiliates, in the post-World War II era. I have spent some time in recent years studying left-wing Finns, who had one time, have a very strong network of social and economic institutions that ultimately disappeared by the early 1950s. That’s another story, but one related to what you looked at in the case of Katherine Hyndman.

 

I responded: “Email me your mailing address and I’ll send you a Steel Shavings magazine that includes excerpts from her jail diary (the full diary is at IU Northwest’s Calumet Regional Archives). I also wrote about her in my “Gary’s First Hundred Years” and in the Winter 2006 issue of Traces of Indiana and Midwestern History. Kathryn was interviewed by Staughton and Alice Lynd and it appears (under a pseudonym) in the 1973 “Rank and File” book. The interview took place in Gary’s Glen Park neighborhood near IU Northwest in the Communist bookstore storefront. Kathryn’s nephew is alive and an Episcopal priest at Gary’s St. Augustine church. They were very close. In 2018 I attended an International Oral History Association conference in Finland and learned about the bloody civil war a century before between the Whites and the Reds. Afterwards, I stayed in Helsinki with Joe Davidow, a musician whose father Mike was a CP member and the author of ‘Cities without Crisis.’”

 

Nephew David Hyndman told me: “Aunt Katie was a private person as much as she could be, given her [civil rights and antiwar] activism. She was not very large and afflicted with curvature of the spine. She walked with a kind of a limp but never let anybody walk over her. Her name was in the paper on a number of occasions in connection with her politics. In fact, someone threw a brick through their apartment window after the Post-Tribune included her address. She wrapped the brick up and marched down to the newspaper, past publisher H.B. Snyder’s secretary into his office. She dropped it on his desk, made a comment about him being responsible for what happened, and walked out. That’s how feisty she was.”

 

Kathryn wrote: “For me the word ‘communism’ came from community and that in a perfect society the people would be the base and the majority would have the last word in any decision. To me it was not enough just to live for yourself. It was necessary to belong to something that went beyond one’s own petty grubbing, a cause that would some day have the common people’s support. I was a member of the CP for a little over 30 years. There were two basic reasons why I dropped out. First, I felt it had outlived its usefulness after Nikita Khrushchev’s revelations concerning mass repressions under Stalin. Second, after moving back to Chicago, I was assigned to a group led by a woman that I suspected was an FBI agent. Others dropped out at the same time.

Until her death in 1978 Kathryn frequently wrote letters to public figures on social issues. Nephew David told me, “Aunt Katie never lost her fierce passion for social justice. She was not ashamed about going to jail because she was convinced she was right and the government wrong.”

Bank Robber John Dillinger

 Bank Robber John Dillinger 

 

“The myth, created by lawmen and embellished by newspapers, and the man are hard to separate.  The myth was not mere fiction, for the man himself was possessed by it and lived up to it finally; and, at times, such as when he escaped from Crown Point, he even exceeded it.” John Toland

 

Even today, Depression-era bank robber John Dillinger is a local celebrity, with a museum in his name housed in the basement of the Lake County courthouse.  Over the weekend, with great fanfare, the 1934 Ford V-8 that Dillinger used as his getaway car, made a grand appearance at the site of where he escaped from jail. When I was writing weekly newspaper article on Gary history, one of the most popular was about Dillinger, who escaped with a Black prisoner, Herbert Youngblood, and was killed emerging from Chicago’s Biograph Theatre with a Gary prostitute known to history as “the Lady in Red” procured for him by brothel madam Anna Sage, a 42-year-old Romanian immigrant who managed Gary’s notorious Kostur Hotel that contained in its basement the Bucket of Blood saloon and rooms upstairs paid for by the hour. Sage had run afoul of immigration authorities and fingered Dillinger in return for reward money and a promise of amnesty from deportation that was later reneged on. In an article later revised for my history of Gary, “City of the Century,” I wrote:

  The swashbuckling manner in which the former Indiana farm boy leaped over railings, wisecracked with tellers, backed roadsters out of alleys, and hoodwinked police captured the imagination of Gary residents and appealed to their fantasies. At a time of low respect for authority, Dillinger was a symbol of rebellion and his crimes seemed no more heinous than the machinations of businessmen or the payoff arrangements among municipal officials and vice lords, bootleggers and numbers racketeers.

 

In January 1934, the Dillinger gang robbed the First National Bank of East Chicago, then fled to Arizona, where he was captured three weeks later after a freak fire destroyed the gang’s cover.  Lake County prosecutor Robert Estill secured his extradition and escorted him to the supposedly “escape-proof Crown Point jail.  After he broke out, a myth arose – started by Dillinger himself for reasons of bravado and to cover up the real story – that he had used a “toy gun” carved from a wooden washboard and darkened with show polish.  In all probability, a judge, bribed by Dillinger’s attorney, provided him with a real pistol. 

 

After Dillinger died in a hail of bullets, his body was put on public display  at the Chicago morgue, ostensibly to quash rumors that he was still alive. One vendor sold handkerchiefs dipped in blood to souvenir hunters. Dillinger’s Quaker father brought the body back to Mooresville, Indiana, and told reporters: “He might have been different if his mother hadn’t died  or if the law had given him a chance when he made his first mistake.” Dillinger was such a flamboyant maverick that the majority of letters to the press about him were complimentary. One “Group of Citizens” wrote: “We say Hurray for John Dillinger.  He is really a man Indiana should be proud to know