Tributes

“Jean Shepherd gets compared to Mark Twain a lot.  He was an American icon and a philosopher in many ways who realized the best medicine is humor.” Nick Mantis”

 

Hammond native Nick Mantis donated items to the Hammond library’s Local History room in tribute to Jean Shepherd, including a plaque the Hoosier bard received in 1981 from the city of Hammond and the academic gown Shep wore when awarded an honorary IU degree in 1995 from Indiana University Northwest. Mantis repeated this famous quote by Shepherd to NWI Times correspondent Joseph S. Pete: “Can you imagine 4,000 years passing, and you’re not even a memory?  Think about it, friends.  It’s not just a possibility.  It is a certainty.”  Then Mantis added, “In his mind, he didn’t want to be forgotten . . . in the city where he came from. He’s going to be remembered in Hammond.”

 

I used to make fun of Readers Digest volumes containing multiple condensed books. I recall my Bucknell professor, William Harbaugh, admitting that his truncated biography of Teddy Roosevelt wasn’t bad but that he hoped it would encourage readers to peruse the original.  At the Banta Center library I found a volume of “World’s Greatest Biographies” that contained “select editions” by A. Scott Berg on Charles Lindbergh, Stefan Zweig on Marie Antoinette, and “The Autobiography of Mark Twain,” edited by Charles Neider.  I’m glad I found it because Twain’s memoirs are humorous and incisive and I’d never read the original. Twain’s paternal ancestors allegedly included a pirate and a Member of Parliament who helped sentence Charles I to death. His father hired slaves from neighboring farmers ($25 a year for a female house servant, $75 yearly for an able-bodied man).  His mother championed abused people and animals; at one time, Twain claimed, “We had 19 cats.” Twain was a practical jokester and put garter snakes in his Aunt Patsy’s work basket: “When she took the basket in her lap and they began to climb out of it, it disordered her mind; she never could seem to get used to them.”

 

Time magazine published a list claiming to be the hundred best Young Adult books of all-time in the order in which they were published.  The first seven – “Little Women,” “Anne of Green Gables,” “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,” “The Diary of Anne Frank,” “Catcher in the Rye,” “Lord of the Flies,” and “To Kill a Mockingbird” - were classics enjoyed by readers of all ages. Almost all of the others, save for “The House on Mango Street” and “Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants,” so far as I could tell (only a handful were familiar to me) seemed to be specifically aimed at young readers, often minority, disabled, and queer groups. Shockingly absent were “The Hobbit” and any Harry Potter books.

 

 Toni and I hosted our monthly bridge group after enjoying an excellent experience at Abbiocco Italian restaurant in Chesterton. We had planned to meet there at 2 but received a call Saturday morning that, due to insufficient staff (a common phenomenon at eateries), they weren’t opening until 3.  I called the other couples and got their OK.  None had been there before, and both the entrees and service were great.  I had a wedge salad with skirt steak added on (plus several pieces of homemade bread) and Toni the lobster tortelloni with lemon cream, roasted tomatoes, and Stracciatella.  In fact, Chuck and Marcy Tomes decided we’d go there again next month at 3 even if we could probably get in earlier. For the second time in three months Toni emerged the winner.

 

Paul Studebaker died, fellow Saturday Evening Club member Jim Wise informed me.  Last year Paul and his son Ben gave an inspiring presentation on the consequences of global warming.  Before they began, Paul said they would not deal with those who deny this is a man-made problem because the facts are incontrovertible.  Here’s what Jim Wise wrote his dear friend: 

    I am saddened to tell everyone that Paul Studebaker passed away Saturday
evening at Northwestern Memorial Hospital. As I was reading the
lyrics of the Doc Watson song "Your Long Journey," Betty Ann texted Michele
to tell her that Paul had died.  Paul and I were friends since 1978 (maybe
1979) when he was recruited from IU Champaign - Urbana for IG Technologies
by Mel Bohlmann. I was on the recruiting trip and thought it was a great
idea. Later in the 1980's, we were colleagues energized by the rapid developments we were experiencing in our work with magnets. We had become good friends quickly outside of work as we were solo acts while
Michele did her internship in Indianapolis. He surprised me in the kitchen
one night dropping a large peanut butter jar intentionally. I had not yet
noticed that the jars were plastic. He was a great fishing buddy - I was
never bitten by a mosquito when Paul was in the boat. One of my great
memories is our foursome white water rafting on the Arkansas River. It was
July 3 and 46 degrees Fahrenheit. We were in front of the raft. No two guys from the Midwest were ever colder.  I wrote cowboy poetry for him to celebrate an important birthday. There was no one better to share work or discuss ideas - or, occasionally to remind you that there might be a more sensible way to do things. I will miss him greatly. 

Here are the lyrics to “Your Long Journey” by Arthel Lane “Doc” Watson (1923-2012), mentioned by Jim Wise.  Blind since a young age, Watson performed folk, country, blues, and gospel music:

God's given us years of happiness here
Now we must part
And as the angels come and call for you
The pangs of grief tug at my heart

Oh my darling my darling
My heart breaks as you take
Your lone journey

Oh the days will be empty the nights so long
Without you my love
And as God calls for you I'm left alone
But we will meet in heaven above

Fond memories I'll keep of the happy days
That on earth we trod
And when I come we will walk hand in hand
As one in heaven in the family of God

 

I just received a booklet titled “A Celebration of IU Northwest Faculty Research and Creative Activity, 2019-2020,” published as part of the IU Bicentennial.  The 15 faculty honored spoke at a program that I attended which took place right before the campus shut down due to the pandemic. Especially stimulating were the 7-minute talks by poet William Allegrezza, theater actor, director, and producer Mark Baer, and Criminal Justice professor Monica Solinas-Saunders, who focuses, she wrote, “on issues associated with incarceration and re-entry.  I am also interested in interpersonal violence and the consequences of abuse among youth and young adults.” In a photo of Steve McShane speaking at a ceremony unveiling a historic marker for Tamarack Hall I am in the audience.  Paul Kern and my history of IUN, “Educating the Calumet Region,” is cited in a section highlighting the role of research at IUN.

 

In the Forum section of the Sunday NWI Times was a column by Korry Shepard, founder of the Gary Historical Collective, titled “A redlining tragedy: Gary’s vacant lots a legacy of 80 years of elite segregation.” The nefarious practice by banks and government agencies graded areas where blacks lived to be at risk of decline, making it practically impossible for African American to obtain home loans or have mortgages insured. Another insidious practice by mortgage lenders leading to the proliferation of abandoned homes is a “bank walkway” or “stalled foreclosure,” where a decision is made not to foreclose on a defaulted mortgage when the property is deemed to have little value – “leaving the structure,” wrote Shepard, “to the elements.”  Shepard concludes:

    Redlining, so-called “white flight,” bank walking, panic peddling, arson, and block busting all took a toll on the City of Gary and elsewhere in the nation.  Sadly, financial institutions are just as much at fault for Gary’s demise as the politicians and criminals who make the papers every day. Apparently, the Region [alite] spent the better part of 50 years dismantling Gary, moving its pieces to other towns, then turning around to wag their fingers when they finished.

Merrillville is presently celebrating its Golden anniversary as an incorporated town with nary a mention of the racist motives or maneuvers that allowed such a thing to happen. 

Resistance

    “Marie Equi was the most interesting woman that ever lived in this state, certainly the most fascinating, colorful, and flamboyant,” Oregon contemporary of Marie Equi

Labeled as “a stormy petrel of the Pacific Northwest” and “a whiskey-loving firebrand,” Dr. Marie Diana Equi (1872-1952) was clubbed by police as she went to the aid of a pregnant cannery worker on strike, physically assaulted by a mob when protesting America’s push into World War I, and imprisoned in San Quentin two years after the Armistice for supposedly having violated the 1918 Sedition Act. The daughter of Italian and Irish immigrants who grew up in the mill town of New Bedford, Massachusetts, Marie dropped out of school at a young age to work in a textile factory. She eventually received schooling in Italy and was able to secure a medical license and open a practice in Portland, Oregon.  She mainly ministered to the poor but also performed abortions for rich women to support her work, which included dispensing birth control information at a time when that was illegal. A lifelong lesbian, she and lover Harriet Frances Speckart raised a daughter Mary. An avowed socialist, suffragette, and free thinker, Marie engaged in an affair with Margaret Sanger and lived for ten years with radical labor activist and feminist Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, the so-called “Rebel Girl” of Joe Hill’s Wobbly anthem.  In 2019 Marie Equi’s contributions were recognized at the San Francisco Rainbow Honor Walk.  Some 113 years before, Marie was among the medical corps volunteers who treated victims of the Golden City’s devastating earthquake.

I first learned about the remarkable Marie Equi from a book Cory Hagelberg lent me, “Resistance: Reclaiming an American Tradition” by Jeff Biggers, the author of several volumes about the Appalachian labor wars. A legacy as old as the nation’s birth, resistance has taken many forms: fights against British oppression, slavery, Indian removal, the exploitation of workers; and on behalf of free speech, environmentalism, and civil rights for women, minority groups, and the poor. Author Biggers (below) described himself as “the grandson of a black lung-afflicted coal miner in southern Illinois who lost his family’s ancestral homestead and farm to strip-mining.” In 1984, at age 21 Biggers was a cellmate of Reverend William Sloane Coffin after both were arrested in Washington, DC, for protesting apartheid in South Africa at that government’s embassy. “Resistance” contains colorful quotes by activists Mary “Mother” Jones (“Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living”) and Fannie Lou Hamer (“If I fall, I will fall five-feet-four forward in the fight for freedom”), as well as this banner seen during the January 2017 Women’s March: “A Woman’s Place Is in the Resistance.”  A 2015 biography by Michael Helquist is subtitled “Radical Politics and Outlaw Passions.”

Corey Hagelberg (below) came to know Jeff Biggers when the author was an artist in residence at Corey’s duneland cottage in Miller. During that time he worked on the script for a dramatic production, “Ecopolis Southshore,” about the potential to transform Gary into a veritable urban utopia through the development of community gardens. It was performed at the Community Progressive Church, located in the shadow of the abandoned Gary Emerson School, whose pastor, Curtis Whittaker, was involving the community in efforts to reclaim the land for sustainable use. Biggers has recently written a play with similar themes that will be performed at Indiana University Northwest and other locations in connection with an ambitious project in the works known as the Midtown Resilience Tour.  “Ecopolis Southshore” contained these lines, uttered in the church production by Walter Jones and Sam Love:

    Walter: The Region gave us so much, has so much to offer. It reminds us that hope dies last, that hope resists.  Tough, resilient, steely.  You wind up being people who make things work, because that’s all you’ve got.

    Sam: Sure, we’re polluted, poisoned, and there’s nowhere to run. But this is my home. We want to do the immediate planting of tiny acorns, rather than blathering beneath a decaying tree about all the good things that could be done.  Just do it.

Town and Gown

    “With their exotic culture, strange ways of behaving, and general arrogance, students did not make many friends with townspeople.” Matthew Harris, “The Divide: Town versus Gown”

During the Middle Ages students in English towns such as Oxford often wore gowns for comfort and warmth in poorly heated buildings, clothing that set them apart from local residents. Disturbances at local pubs sometimes escalated into full-scale riots, as students had a tendency to look down on “townies,” who in turn resented the snobbish interlopers.  This “divide” between town and gown continued into modern times although experts have found evidence that divisions are fading as higher education has become available to larger percentages of the populace.

When I attended Bucknell University in Lewisburg, PA, in the 1960s, some students referred to local residents as townies and retained a condescending attitude toward them. Though the fraternity I joined and the house where I boarded junior year were off campus, I had little contact with neighborhood residents.  The only time I visited a local bar was to buy a six-pack to carry out. Sundays at the Bucknell Women’s cafeteria where I worked, numerous townspeople would arrive in their Sunday best for the dinner served at midday.  I certainly didn’t look down on them, I just didn’t think much about them.

Meeting with Valparaiso University professors Liz Wuerffl and Allison Schuette at Hunter’s brewery in Chesterton, I offered to interview seniors living at the Pines retirement village as part of their Welcome Project. Since several emeritus VU professors reside there, as well as other longtime Valpo residents, I suggested that the project be called Town and Gown. I added that the oral histories might also pertain to the Flight Paths initiative that I have been a part of for the past couple years and that I could publish excerpts in a forthcoming Steel Shavings issue. In the Editor’s Note to my volume on “Life in Northwest Indiana during the Plague Year, 2020,” I wrote that the year began with high hopes for interviewing Valpo residents that wer e soon dashed by the pandemic.  Since then, I have been itching to get back to doing oral histories.  Liz and Allison liked the idea, so I plan to scout out a room at the Pines where we could videotape the interviews. I noted that during the 1970s I was oral history interviewer for Sandy Appleby’s Tri-Cities Mental Health Center grant funded project on active seniors and that, with so many Baby Boomers reaching retirement age, gerontology has become a hot topic, and there could well be grant possibilities for funding. I often refer to my Life Review interview with Texas Slim, which I had to do a second time due to a videotape breakdown. It was nowhere as rich as the first time because he knew I already had heard the stories. Object lesson: never talk in detail beforehand to interviewees.

It was great seeing Liz and Allison after many long months.  I ordered a pale ale evidently brewed on site by Hunter’s, advertised as made with flaked oats, cascade, amarillo, and mosaic hops, and named “Perhaps Perhaps Perhaps,”  which Allison found appropriate, given the uncertainty of the coming months, given the Delta variant. We sat at a table outside until it started raining.  Inside, we thought the rain had died down but when we make a break to our cars, it came down full force.  As I emailed Liz and Allison afterwards, I was really hoofing it and hadn’t moved that quickly in months, if not years. They replied that I should give them a couple weeks to get ready for Fall semester but then we could set up shop at the Pines, perhaps in the residents’ apartments if no common room was available.

Among those who replied to my Facebook post about “Town and Gown” was Sandy Appleby, who offered to help with the project, and Anne Balay, whose books about gay and lesbian steelworkes and transgender long haul truckers are oral history classics.  Former IUN professor Don Coffin wrote:     

    Interestingly, when I was a student at DePauw, I had a fair amount of contact with a couple of locals—Terry and Eddie, who ran Romilda Printing. And did the typesetting for the student-run newspaper.(This was, obviously, before offset printing took over.). Those of us who worked on the paper knew how crucial they were to our work, and they got a kick out of us. Had the aspiring journalists pursued other interests, things might have been much less interesting.

I replied to Coffin: “Stereotypes about townies tend to break down if one gets to know the community where the college is located.”

Belt magazine editor Sandi Wisenberg belatedly mailed my review copy of Samuel Love’s “The Gary Anthology,” which contained these nice words in the editor’s introduction by my former student: “Since 1975, the Steel Shavings oral history series, the lifework of Indiana University Northwest emeritus professor of history “Jimbo” Lane, has chronicled the everyday life of Gary and Calumet Region residents.” Belt’s latest online memoir is “My Summer of Steel” by Bob Zeni. In 1972, before his son started a summer job at his old man’s plant, Bruno Zeni (below) told him, “Remember two things, lift with your legs and steel don’t bleed.” After day one, still in his work clothes, Bob (left, in 1971) fell asleep on the front stoop; after day 2 he conked out at the kitchen table, most of his beer still undrunk. Referring to the “debilitating grind of manual labor,” Zeni had a new appreciation for his father, “caught in its maelstrom for three decades . . . so our family would have a better life.”

Haven of Bliss

 “For 14 straight years, our vacations were spent in southern Michigan on the shores of colorful Clear Lake.  Clear Lake – it was many things, but one thing it wasn’t was clear.”  Jean Shepherd

In the short story “Ollie Hopnoodle’s Haven of Bliss,” found in “Wanda Hickey’s Night of Golden Memories and Other Disasters” and made into a 1988 TV comedy film, Shepherd notes, “It was never very clear why we went there, but we did. Such are the vacations of the humble.” Haven of Bliss was the name of the green cabin the old man reserved in Marcellus, Michigan, for the two weeks.  Others bore the names Dew Drop Inn, Rest-a Spell, Bide-a Wee, Neva-Care, and Sun-N-Fun.  Ollie had upgraded the grounds, he informed the old man on the phone when he confirmed the reservation, by putting two more holes in the outhouse.

In anticipation of the trip the old man took the “goat-vomit green” Oldsmobile to Paswinski’s Garage for a “cabalistic ritual” – a tune-up.  Setting the alarm for 4:30 a.m. in hopes of beating the Sunday traffic, the old man overslept and then began the morning as he “had begun every day since the age of four with a Lucky [Strike] and a cup of black coffee.” Then it was off to the bathroom from which he emerged “with a wad of toilet paper plastered to a nasty gash on his chin.” Hardly moving once they reached the highway, the old man cursed out the “lousy Chicago drivers” and unleashed a “vast catalog of invective learned in the field, so to speak, the back of the stockyards on the South Side of Chicago.” Once traffic thinned out in Michigan “the Olds had a habit of thrumming, resonant vibration at about 50 that jiggled the bones, loosened the molars, rattled the eyeballs, and made all talk totally impossible.” Finally, after a flat tire and other misadventures, the family reached their destination only to find the cabin – their Haven of Bliss – without electricity. The saga concludes:

    The rain roared steadily on the roof – as it would for the next two weeks – and drummed metronomically onto the bare wooden floor beside my bed. . . . My kid brother tossed and whimpered softly from beneath his pillow; and across the room, my father’s low, muttering snores thrummed quietly in the night. We were on vacation.

When I was a kid, it seemed inevitably to rain whenever our family went camping in the Poconos.  Midge referred to the phenomenon sarcastically as “Lane weather.” Perhaps because of those experiences, I’ve never been a fan of “roughing it” in the outdoors.  Fortunately, when Phil and Dave attended Alternative Public School up to seventh and eighth grades, on the agenda, thanks to teacher Del Meyers, were annual fall and spring three-day camping trip, relieving me of any guilt over denying my sons that experience. 

In her eighties Midge, along with my 92-year-old stepfather Howie, joined us for a week in Saugatuck, one the main highlights being a Dunes buggy ride; the following week, we rented a cabin in southern Michigan with Phil’s family near a small lake resembling the locale described by Shepherd [a small town named Marcellus actually exists near a body of water called Fish Lake]. I recall evening campfires, days spent swimming and boating, and not being cursed by “Lane weather.” We looked into repeating the adventure a couple years later only to discover that the area had been gentrified and the rentals were no longer available.

For the 85-year-old protagonist of Kathleen Rooney’s “Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk” (2017), recommended to me by Gaard Logan, New York City remained her “haven of bliss” in the mid-1980s despite signs of decay and social unrest.  On New Year’s Eve Lillian walks its streets to dine at Delmonico’s and attend a party in Chelsea. Born near the end of the 19th century (although she lies about her age), she was a nonconformist who preferred a career in advertising at Macy’s to getting married and raising a family in the suburbs. Though she did eventually wed and bear a son, Lillian only lasted two months in the suburbs. growing up, her role model was an Aunt Sadie, a nurse at St. Vincent Hospital (poet Edna St. Vincent Millay got her middle name because doctors at St. Vincent saved his life shortly before  Edna was born), taught Lillian to have a social conscious, and died at age 50 during the wartime flu epidemic. Once the highest paid woman in her field, a poet, and a published author, Lillian was forced to retire from Macy’s when pregnant and in her old age has been largely forgotten but still vibrant.  When she meets a woman from Garrettsville, Ohio, she notes that it was the hometown of poet Hart Crane, who committed suicide by diving from an ocean liner.  

County Fair

 “We were so close now that the sounds of the fair began to drift over the roar of motors: calliopes bleating, whistles, merry-go-round music, bells ringing, barkers.” Jean Shepherd

As the Porter County Fair prepares to open, I decided to reread Region bard Jean Shepherd’s account of “the Indiana county fairs I have known” in “Wandy Hickey’s Night of Golden Memories.”  Setting the stage, he described the scene the previous evening in Hammond as he and his friends debated whether the monster ride, called the Rocket Whip, addled one’s brains or stunted one’s growth: “The rain drizzled down steadily, carrying with it its full load of blast furnace dust and other by-products of the steel mills and oil refineries that ringed the town like iron dinosaurs.” His “Old Man” loved the dirt track races (“as much a part of Indiana county fairs as applesauce, pumpkins, and pig judging”), while his kid brother favored the Ferris Wheel and his long-suffering mother the quilt exhibit. After surviving a near-gridlocked traffic jam, the family observed a 2-ton prize-winning pumpkin that bore a resemblance to President Franklin D. Roosevelt and a pig named “Big Horace” who had tiny red eyes and had eaten half his blue ribbon. A White Sox fan, the “Old Man” was awestruck by a quilt bearing the likeness of shortstop Luke Appling, “the foul ball king.”  

Approaching the thrill ride area, they passed “guys with leather jackets and great mops of carefully groomed, greasy hair ranging through the crowd, looking for fights and girls.” The “Old Man” insisted on taking the boys on the Rocket Whip, “a classic of its kind.”  Shepherd elaborated:

    It consisted of two bullet-shaped cars, one yellow, one red, attached to the ends of rotating arms.  It revolved simultaneously clockwise and up and down. At the same time, the individual cars rotated in their own orbits.  

Trapped in their wire mesh cage, the “Old Man” lost all his change and a prized fountain pen given to him by the bowling team.  Once the operator turned the power on full, his hat flew off and kid brother Randy puked all over him. Passing through the turnstile afterwards with “a bent cigarette hanging from his lips,” he told the operator it was great. Shepherd wrote: “He always judged a ride by how sick it made him. The nausea quotient of the Rocket Whip was about as high as they come.”

My initial Indiana fair experience came as a result of manning the Indiana University Northwest booth at the Lake County fair for several hours in a sweltering exhibition hall lacking air conditioning.  Leaving after dark, I had trouble locating our car since I’d had to park on a winding road rather than in a lot. 

Once I heard that the Porter County fair’s exhibition hall had air conditioning, I volunteered for it for about ten years during the time Phil and Dave were growing up.  It was a good way to socialize with and sometimes meet for the first time professors and staff working the same shift as I. Various displays were giving away pens, bottle openers, fans, and other stuff, and I could sample free Culligan water whenever I got thirsty.  The only drawback was that a Republican booth was almost always located straight across from us.  The kids’ favorite attraction was the pig races; you could bet on a pig and get a small prize if your entry won. A Religious Studies adjunct operated a food truck with his family and would always give me a generous assortment of fried vegetables. Though no longer tempted to patronize the fair, which was cancelled last year due to Covid, I look back fondly at the memories, especially of those pig races.

Jill Semko Underly shared her many memories of the Lake County Fair. “As a 10 year 4H member, I practically lived there. Jr. leaders ran a food stand too. Hopefully those exhibition halls are now air conditioned. They had a great pie stand run by a ladies sorority or maybe it was the homemakers association.” 

Maryland grad school buddy Ray Smock, who gave me Shepherd’s “In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash” when I was hired to teach at IUN in Gary, wrote: “Thanks for a taste of Jean Shepherd. No matter how many times I read him, I laugh like I did the first time I read him. I laugh because his stories speak universal truths about everyday life, and hearing the truth is always a liberating thing.”

Connie Mack-Ward recalled attending county fairs in Sullivan County while at her grandmother’s in the tiny town of Hymera: “We could see the lights and the ferris wheel looming and hear the merry-go-round music from her house, at the picnic grounds behind the high school on a road that started every summer with fresh gravel but eventually was mostly red clay as the gravel was flung into the roadside ditches by passing vehicles. Every night of the three glorious days the small traveling carnival was there.  When desk approached, we were finally told that we could go now.  We four kids would run and speedwalk all the way there, earnestly discussing which rides we would pick for the three tickets we were allowed to buy each night. My favorites were the chair swings, the Octopus, and the absolute best, the Tilt-A-Whirl. As we approached our destination, we could smell the lubricating oil from the rides, the cotton candy, popcorn, as wellas the fryng chicken  and boiling corn-on-the-cob of the dinners in the Methodist food tent.”

Albert Einstein and Civil Rights

    “America’s worst disease is its treatment of the Negro.” Albert Einstein

When German physicist Albert Einstein arrived in the United States, Isabel Wilkerson wrote in “Caste,” he was saddened to discover “that he had landed in yet another caste system, one with a different scapegoat caste and different methods but with embedded hatreds that were not so unlike the one he had fled.” Even before he’d left his homeland, Einstein had spoken out on behalf of the Scottsboro Boys, railroaded on false rape charges in Alabama, and written in “The Crisis,” edited by W.E.B. DuBois, encouraging African Americans not to let racists drag down their self-worth.  Living in Princeton, New Jersey, most of whose public facilities were segregated and whose African Americans were forced to live in ghetto slums, he and wife Elsa invited famed contralto Marion Anderson to stay with them following a 1937 sell-out performance McCarter Theater because she was unable to stay at the local Nassau Inn. He wrote, “Being a Jew myself, I can understand and empathize with how black people feel as victims of discrimination.”

After World War II Einstein was spurred to action when returning Black G.I. were subjected to torture and even death for refusing to act deferentially toward the dominant caste.  He agreed to chair the NAACP anti-lynching committee and delivered the commencement address at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, the oldest Black college in America. While there, Einstein discussed the theory of relativity with Physics students, played with faculty kids, including Julian Bond, son of the university president, and accepted an honorary degree.

During the Red Scare, Southern demagogues in Congress focused their wrath on civil rights activists. W.E. B. DuBois was one victim, actor and old friend Paul Robeson another.  Einstein offered to be a character witness for DuBois and invited Robeson to Princeton University. In 1952, in an article for “Pageant” magazine, Einstein addressed those questioning the motives of civil rights activists: “Your ancestors dragged the black people from their homes by force; and in the white man’s quest for wealth and the easy life they have been ruthlessly suppressed and exploited, degraded into slavery. The modern prejudice against Negroes is a result of the desire to maintain this unworthy condition.”

Dan Rather

     “I was tagged as too intense to be an anchor man, too bull-headed.” Dan Rather

Born in Texas in December of 1931, the son of a ditch digger, Dan Rather grew up in Houston, did play-by play for the city’s minor league baseball team, the Buffs, and established a national reputation as a television reporter with his coverage of Hurricane Carla in 1961, when 350,000 Texas residents had to be evacuated.  At one point Rather offered to chain himself to a tree to demonstrate nature’s powerful clout.  He covered the assassination of JFK in 1963, was a foreign correspondent in Vietnam in 1966, and served as White House correspondent during the Richard M. Nixon administration (see below), frequently annoying the President with persistent questions about the Watergate scandal. For an unprecedented 24 years beginning in 1981, Rather anchored the CBS Evening News but was terminated after airing a segment on “60 Minutes” based on questionable documents claiming that President George W. Bush’s service with the Air National Guard was virtually nonexistent. In his ninetieth year, Rather still has not retired and retains an edginess that came to be his trademark.

Rather’s 1994 book “The Camera Never Blinks Twice” discusses his harrowing on-the-ground adventures and coverage of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan during the 1980s and such breaking stories as Chinese student protest in Tiananmen Square, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Persian Gulf War, the Branch Davidian conflagration in Waco, Texas, starvation in Somalia, ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia, and the 1993 Mississippi River flood. That year, he returned to Vietnam, where he still had reoccurring nightmares from seeing a soldier’s legs blown off by a land mine and visiting a room full of amputees on a hospital ship.  At a Da Nang hotel lighters taken off dead G.I.s were for sale.  He interviewed General Norman Schwarzkopf on the roof of the former American embassy, where cameras had captured helicopters rescuing Americans 18 years before.  Schwarzkopf told Rather he’d been stationed in Alaska at the time and after observing the humiliating end to America’s longest war (at the time) went out and got drunk.

Rather’s two journalistic role models were Edward R. Murrow and Eric Severeid, whom he described as “a man’s man when that was still something you said.”  Though he began with a self-deprecating anecdote about a fan informing him the his fly was unzipped, Rather was very much a macho Texan who admired personal bravery and for a time signed off the air with the single word “courage.”  In “The Camera Never Blinks Twice” he lets us know his fondness for Red Man chewing tobacco, that he hunted quail with Severeid, fly-fishes for trout, and likes to be where the action is. As he wrote, “The best stories do not make office calls.” He has survived being, as Walter Cronkite once said, “waist deep in water moccasins,” been “maced, mugged, and arrested,” and had his sleep in an Afghanistan barn interrupted by scorpions. Rather carried with him a Cuban cigar given him by Fidel Castro.  He bragged about drinking in Dubrovnik till dawn and missing the press plane as well as his “undiminished” respect for Marshall Josip Broz Tito, who well into his 80s spent days in Dubrovnik’s ancient mud baths with his mistress.

Like all great reporters Dan Rather had an eye for the human dimension of cataclysmic events. In Sarajevo in August 1993, where I had visited a decade before, prior to the dismantlement of Yugoslavia, Rather met 9-year-old Malik, a victim of an artillery shell that had landed in his home while he was eating breakfast during a siege that killed 9,000 civilians and maimed countless others. Rushed to a hospital that had been struck 14 times and lacked water or electricity, doctors operated on him by candlelight. Writing that because Malik and his parents were of the “wrong” race and religion, he was a paraplegic, Rather concluded: “Malik was excited to have visitors from America, and he mustered a weak smile in the sunlight of midmorning. It was a welcome I won’t forget.”

    “That’s all folks,” epitaph on tombstone of Mel Blanc, voice of Porky Pig and other Disney animated characters

Filmmaker Chris Robinson chose “Looted” as a fitting epitaph for his documentary of Gary, his hometown.  While the word is commonly associated with lawlessness that takes place in the aftermath of protest, it can also refer to illicit gains by public officials or private companies.  In “Looted” former mayor Dozier T. Allen points the finger at big business, while Karen Freeman-Wilson mentions the steel mills, which profited from being in Gary but did not repay the city commensurately.   Robinson told the Gary Crusader, prior to a screening of “Looted” at the ArtHouse:

    I love my city!  It’s a place that raised me, and I felt compelled to do the research and tell this story.  Once my generation learn the true history of Gary, we will be armed with knowledge and hopefully motivated to do our part to effect change. 

A recent NWI Times obit for Andrea “Conchita” Olivares, who died at age 90 and once co-owned and operated Sam and Conchita’s Bakery in East Chicago, ran photos of her both as a younger and elderly woman.  That makes ma lot of sense. Obits for Jean De Young and Sandra Schaefer included the fact that Jean was a gifted oil and china painter, while Sandra “will always be re-membered for her luck playing the slot machines on the casino boat.”

At Charlie and Naomi’s for four-couple bridge, Chuck Tomes mentioned hearing from a Gary Emerson grad that during Ted Karras’ pro football career, linemen were so poorly paid that he started teaching at a Gary school in the off season and was assigned a notoriously tough class.  On the first day, when a kid acted up, Karras picked up both him and the desk he was sitting in and tossed him out the door, along with the desk.  Nobody gave him trouble after that.  I told of interviewing Ted Karras at his home in Miller and being told by his wife that we needed to be done by 11 because that was when reruns of the sitcom Webster, starring brother Alex, came on.