Chesterton

“You know what we say in Chesterton, it’s a Chester ton of fun.” Jim Gaffigan

According to NWI Times correspondent Eloise Marie Valadez, “Happenings in Chesterton” was a “Community Calendar” comedy segment on a recent airing of “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.” On hand to poke fun at his Hoosier hometown was 55-year-old Jim Gaffigan, the youngest of six children who played football at La Porte La Lumiere High School and whose Irish Catholic father was CEO of Mercantile National Bank. Known as a “clean comic” whose stand-up routines often center on such subjects as food, fatherhood, and laziness, Gaffigan currently lives in Manhattan with a wife and five children and has appeared in KFC commercials as Colonel Sanders.

Among the things to do in Chesterton, Indiana, where Toni and I now live, mentioned by Colbert and Gaffigan were a Family-Friendly Improv Comedy event on the beach at the Indiana Dunes, Destruction Derby Night at the Porter County Fair, a Lake Michigan bachelorette cruise featuring an appearance by the Men of Michigan City Strippers, and European Market (which I’ve attended), where goods, according to Colbert, come from Milan, Illinois, Paris, Michigan, and French Lick, Indiana.

Prior to moving to Chesterton in 2010, I had heard that, like many rural Indiana towns, Blacks historically had been unwelcome; otherwise, I didn’t know much about the community beyond what a few of my IUN students had written for articles that appeared in issues of Steel Shavings. At one time downtown Chesterton evidently sported a movie theater and a roller rink. Forty years ago, Kevin B. Ryan interviewed Baillytown teacher Miss Larson, who recalled that during the 1920s numerous farmers went to work in the steel mills and young girls out of school could find jobs as clerks in downtown Gary stores and shops. During Prohibition many folks made their own homebrew, and Porter County sheriff W. F. Forney conducted frequent raids against bootleggers and their illegal stills.

In “Chesterton in Transition” Michael J. Hayduk wrote that during the 1920s many farmers were obtaining electricity, Dunes Highway (now U.S. 12) was completed, land developers, both legitimate and illegitimate, were proliferating, and downtown stores were selling such new consumer items as Kodak cameras and Pyrex glassware. Hayduk also wrote about railroad accidents and an unnecessary shooting:

The most controversial 1920 story in the pages of the Chesterton Tribune involved the New York Central railroad crossing on Calumet Road in the heart of the downtown section. After a woman was killed by a train in January, there were editorials advocating better safety precautions. Then when a beloved milkman was struck fatally in May, the outcry increased. Finally, after three Chicagoans died at the crossing on July 1, the New York Central replaced the incompetent guard with a new man and added warning bells and gates to “Death Crossing.”

The people of the Chesterton area imagined that their community was free of the problems besetting such cities as Gary and Chicago, but occasionally a crime story would shatter this bucolic image. The trial of two railway detectives charged with shooting a motorist who had been changing a tire at midnight near company property not only captured much public attention but revealed an undertone of racism in the proceedings. Those interested in freeing the detectives dwelled on the criminal record of the motorist and inferred that he was a Negro who had been trying to pass as white. The trial was not very fair, and the jury rendered a not guilty verdict on grounds of self-defense. 

Gun Victim Wallace Broadnax

 “I am heartbroken and disgusted by the senseless brutality that took the life of Wallace Broadnax, a dedicated, lifelong member of our community.  Violence in our community is a public health crisis.” Gary mayor Jerome Prince

My heart sank and I let out a groan upon learning from a front-page headline that former Gary Roosevelt basketball star Wallace Broadnax had been fatally shot at a Clark gas station on the 2200 block of Grant Street shortly after 7 a.m. Saturday during a botched robbery by two juveniles now in custody. It was the twenty-first homicide in Gary since the beginning of the year. As a high school basketball fan, his name was familiar to me as a junior on the legendary squad that defeated Indianapolis Shortridge 68-60 at Hinkle Fieldhouse just three months after Richard Gordon Hatcher took office as the first Black mayor of a significantly sized city. Blaine Smith recalled that in NIPSCO’s downtown display window were life-size pictures of all the players, coaches, and managers. When civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated a few weeks later on April 4, 1968, Hatcher asked members of that team to help prevent young people from taking out their anger and frustration in acts of destruction. Aside from a few isolated acts, Gary was one of few American cities to avoid a riot during those terrible hours. In 1993 Broadnax and his teammates were inducted into the I ndiana Basketball Hall of Fame.

After graduating in 1969, Broadnax played basketball in Europe for a few years before returning to Gary, where he spent 25 years as an engineer in the fire department and also worked for Guy and Allen Funeral Home. Former colleague Mark Jones recalled that “Wally was an exemplary firefighter, a great engineer [who] got us to where we needed to be.”  Retired fire captain William Todd told Bob Kasarda of the NWI Times: “Wally was a soft-spoken, well-mannered guy who would give you the shirt off his back.”

Those sentiments were echoed by nephew Anthony Broadnax, who told WGN’s Andy Koval after rushing to the scene of the tragedy, “He was backing away from these boys, they were pretty young and they just panicked, ran on foot, didn’t even get anything.  Completely senseless. If they had asked for money, he would have given it to them.  He wasn’t trying to tussle with these guys.” Anthony continued, “Back in 1968, Black teens took so much pride in their school and neighborhood because they weren’t allowed to live anywhere else in Gary.  To think of harming someone elderly would have been unthinkable.” The nephew concluded: “Most of our family is Christian and from Gary. We know the hopelessness and causes that breeds these things.  We are heartbroken and angry, but we understand where this comes from.  Those boys have thrown their lives away.”

A member of the First Baptist Church, Broadnax leaves behind grieving widow Valerie, an Aunt Lulu, two brothers and a sister, four children, ten grandchildren, and, to quote the obituary, “a host of nieces, nephews, other relatives, and friends.” He’ll be sorely missed.

Drew Pearson and Walter Winchell

 “Drew Pearson gained his power playing by pre-modern rules of journalism that we would now find reprehensible, New York Times reviewer Richard J. Tofel

Reviewers have had high praise for Donald Ritchie’s meticulously researched new book “The Columnist: Leaks, Lies, and Libel: Drew Pearson’s Washington.” Once a household name, the self-professed “keyhole peeper” whose syndicated column “Washington Merry-Go-Round” once appeared in over 600 newspapers, is far less well-known than Dallas Cowboys Hall of Famer Drew Pearson, recipient of Roger Staubach’s playoff game-winning “Hail Mary” pass. Born into an Illinois Quaker family in 1897, Pearson attended Swarthmore College and married the daughter of Washington Times-Herald owner Eleanor “Cissy” Patterson. His controversial column and radio program were famous for so-called “scoops,” combining outrage, sarcasm, and gallows humor delivered in a spirit of muckraking moral indignation.  He exposed foes’ sexual peccadilloes, such as that General Douglas MacArthur had an 18-year-old filipina mistress. Between 1932 and 1969 he broke stories about FDR’s court-packing plans, General George Patton slapping a soldier, the mental instability of Harry S Truman’s Defense secretary James Forrestal, Truman’s 1950 meeting with MacArthur on Wake Island, Senator Joseph McCarthy soliciting favors for Private G. David Schine, and Attorney-General Robert F. Kennedy wire-tapping Martin Luther King, Jr.

Pearson was sued more than 150 times and lost only once – to a high-powered lobbyist.  The FBI tapped his phone, opened his mail, and employed spies against him, compiling thousands of pages for Director J. Edgar Hoover’s benefit, to which Ritchie gained access. Richard Tofel noted that when Pearson dropped dead of a heart attack in 1969, the New York Times editorialized about his “pugnacity, vindictiveness, and irresponsibility” but also praised his “fearless dedication to the belief that the independent and resourceful reporter is the indispensable guardian of good-government.”  Echoing that sentiment, Ritchie concluded: “The evidence confirms that he performed a public service by revealing how politicians and government really worked.”

The June 2021 Journal of American History contains a review of the “American Masters” documentary “Walter Winchell: The Power of Gossip.” Like Pearson now almost forgotten and born, as was Pearson, in 1897 to Russian-born Jews, Winchell grew up on New York’s Lower East Side and was a tap dancer in vaudeville, a naval officer during World War,  and as a newspaper columnist and radio personality regarded journalism as entertainment. Syndicated in 2,000 newspapers and familiar to radio audiences for a staccato delivery, he began shows by saying, “Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. America from border to border and coast to coast and all the ships at sea.  Let’s go to press.”  For background effect, he employed the sound of a telegraph key.  

Winchell’s coverage of the Lindbergh baby kidnapping vaulted him into prominence as more than a gossip columnist, and during the Franklin Roosevelt administration he was an avid supporter of the New Deal, preparedness, the FBI, and civil rights. There was a nasty, thin-skinned side to Winchell, however, and he was a philanderer who welcomed feuds with the likes of Ed Sullivan and “Tonight”show  host Jack Paar. With a fedora on his head and a cigarette dangling from his mouth, he was a familiar sight at Table 50 of Manhattan’s Stork Club, where he never paid and hobnobbed with those he wrote about.  He fell for demagogue Joe McCarthy’s anti-communist posturings, and his popularity was waning when selected in 1959 to narrate “The Untouchables” TV series. In 1963 the New York Daily Mirror folded during a newspaper strike at a time when his hysterical style was rapidly going out of favor, leaving him begging for work.  According to Professor Michael J. Socolow, before succumbing to prostate cancer in 1973, Winchell’s final years was spent as a recluse at L.A.’s Ambassador Hotel, pathetically “typing out mimeographed sheets with his column, handing them out on the corner.”

While Pearson and Winchell’s generation of frenetic newsmen was replaced by a group of professionals who came of age during World War II, their tabloid style has never gone away.  The PBS documentary compares their popularity and conservative populist style to the “Drudge Report” and in our age of social media acknowledges the temptation for news producers to cater to sensationalism and, in short, the lowest common denominator.

Ray Smock, like Ritchie a fellow University of Marylnd grad student during the late 1960s and diector of the Robert C. Byrd Center, wrote : “I first encountered Drew Pearson when I was ten years old and he had a cameo appearance in my all time favorite movie: The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951). It is Pearson who announces that a flying saucer had landed on the Mall in DC! How’s this for movie trivia?”  Smock recently hosted a zoom lecture by Ritchie on “The Columnist.” Progressice Era historian H. Samuel Merrill, author of “The Republican Command,” was Ritchie and my academic adviser, and Smock’s was Louis Harlan, acclaimed biographer of African-American educator Booker T. Washington.

Valley Forge

 “Awake, awake, Sir Billy

There a forage in the plain.

Ah, leave your little Filly,

And open the campaign.”

   Doggerel poking fun at General William Howe

Had William Howe, commander of English forces occupying Philadelphia, led an attack on General George Washington’s ragtag Continental army at Valley Forge during the winter of 1777-1778, it is conceivable that he might have snuffed out the colonial rebellion.  Instead, as Cokie Roberts wrote in “Founding Mothers: The Women Who Raised Our Nation” (2004), the notorious Betsey Loring kept him lustily occupied in the “City of Brotherly Love,” inspiring snide stanzas, including these lines:

    Sir William, he, snug as a flea,

     Lay all this time a-snoring

     Nor dreamed of harm as he lay warm

     In bed with Mrs. L----g.

Growing up in Fort Washington, PA, not far from Valley Forge, I visited those “hallowed grounds” numerous times, most memorably on a beautiful spring day with California cousins Tommi and Judy and their parents, my dad’s oldest brother Jim and Aunt Tut. Tommi would have had my name, James Buchanan Lane, had she not been born a girl. Judy, whom I’d never met before, was slightly older than I, beautiful and sophisticated but very friendly.  I haven’t seen her since.  In recent years I have been in touch with Tommi.Valley Forge was also a Pennsylvania turnpike exit where I’d sometimes meet Toni on my way home from college at Bucknell.

In July the history book club to which I belong will reconvene at Gino’s in Merrillville after a long hiatus due to the pandemic. Cal Bellamy will lead a discussion of Joel Richard Paul’s “Without Precedent: Chief Justice John Marshall and His Times” (2018). It opens with the lowborn Marshall, the eldest of 15 children who grew up in a two-room Virginia log cabin and had virtually no formal education, joining General Washington’s army as a rifleman during the terrible winter of 1777-1778. Conditions were so dire that common soldiers were deserting in large numbers even though if caught they could be hanged. Some were reduced to roasting their own leather shoes in efforts, usually futile, to stave off starvation, while officers were eating mutton and veal in comfortable quarters toasting Washington’s health with the General’s favorite Madeira.  The experience left an indelible mark on Marshall in terms of shaping his belief in the necessity of a strong central government and in gaining respect for the leadership qualities of George Washington.

“Without Precedent” concentrates on the momentous judicial decisions that the Supreme Court issued during the 35 years of Marshall’s leadership, which increased the federal government’s authority.  Most being familiar to me, I was more interested in Marshall’s private life and in the diplomatic mission to France that he undertook in the late 1790s during the John Adams administration, sometimes known as the XYZ Affair.  Marshall’s mother was descended from the eccentric Randolph family, and Marshall was also the third cousin of his lifelong arch-rival Thomas Jefferson. 

From Cokie Roberts’ “Founding Mothers” I was acutely aware that colonial women during this time were expected to produce multiple children, no matter the stress on their physical and mental health. Marshall’s wife Polly, the daughter of Jefferson’s first love, with whom John was smitten when she was 13 and married when she was 16, produced three children within four years, two of whom died, leaving her severely depressed. Altogether she underwent ten difficult pregnancies, four of which ended tragically.  John Marshall, Jr., became an alcoholic who got kicked out of Harvard and left a mountain of debt when he succumbed to his addiction. For most of her life, Polly was a virtual recluse, frequently bedridden and emotionally exhausted.  By age 50, according to Paul, Polly “had shrunk into a skeletal, childlike figure,” terrified at night that somebody was hiding under her bed. Though the author claims that Marshall doted on her, he “viewed his wife’s unhappiness as a failure of will,”  was absent for long periods, engaged in an affair in Paris with one of Minister Talleyrand’s spies (femme fatale Madame Reine de Villette), enjoyed a bachelor’s life while court was in session, remained “an incurable flirt” well into his sixties and in all probability had other trysts while away “from his long-suffering wife.” 

 

September’s book club speaker Rich Maroc will discuss the effects of the French Huguenot diaspora on the American Revolution; but, with nobody volunteering for November, secretary Joy Anderson asked if I’d talk about my Steel Shavings volume on “Life in Northwest Indiana during the Plague Year, 2020.” While many members will consider my journal to be current events, I’ll defend it as a primary source for future scholars and compare it to Daniel Defoe’s “Journal of the Plague Year” and Frederick Lewis Allen’s classic social history of the 1920s, “Only Yesterday.”  It will also provide an opportunity to summarize my interest in studying history from the bottom up, starting with the personal and including such aspects of popular culture as music, sports, recreation, and work experiences. Traditionalists, including the several Abrahan Lincoln buffs, will come across information on historical events that occurred in the 1860s, as well as the “Roaring Twenties,” 1950s and other past decades. I’ll be curious about what members think and look forward to the feedback.

I invited Post-Tribune columnist Jerry Davich to July’s book club meeting and told him I’d been speaking in November.  Shortly after people’s lives began changing as a result of the pandemic, Davich encouraged readers to keep a journal documenting what it was like  experiencing this dark period in our history and publicized a facebook site urging a similar practice.  After I published “Life in Northwest Indiana during the Plague Year,” I sent him a copy but never heard back from him.  it’s possible he never received it, so I told him there would be copies available at the July meeting.His name appears a half-dozen times, as indicated by the Index, mainly in connections with articles he wrote, including one about Brent Schroeder, 55, who during the 1980s and 1990s played with the heavy metal bands Prisoner and Hap Hazzard. I thought of those bands when I read that Faster Pussycat will be performing at the Art Theater in Hobart, whose albums include “The Power and the Glory Hole” and whose singles include “Bathroom Wall.” Members brag about appearing in the rockumentary “The Decline of Western Civilization, Part 2.”

Madam C.J. Walker

 “Don’t sit and wait for opportunities to come.  Get up and make them.” Madam C.J. Walker 

The subject of the Winter 2020 Traces of Indiana and Midwestern History cover story, “Sheer Will,” is the Indiana Historical Society’s Madam C.J. Walker collection documenting the remarkable African American hair-care and cosmetics industry pioneer and the company she founded. Born Sarah Breedlove in 1867 on a Louisiana Delta cotton plantation, the daughter of slaves, the future entrepreneur was orphaned at seven, had virtually no formal education, and once worked as a washerwoman. Among the products her company developed and advertised in Black newspapers and magazines, offered by direct mail as well as from a sophisticated sales force, and utiized in countless beauty salons and households, were scalp ointment to stimulate hair growth, pomade, bath oil, liquid make-up, cologne, shampoo, and hair coloring. Madam Walker opened beauty colleges in Pittsburgh, Chicago, Harlem, and Indianapolis, where she relocated her permanent headquarters in 1910, nine years before her death at age 51 from hypertension and kidney failure. Philanthropist, patron of the arts, civil rights advocate, and worldly marketeer, Madam C.J. Walker, in the words of great-great granddaughter A’Lelia Bundles, “created career opportunities for thousands of African American women.”

Traces editor Ray E. Boomhower described an 1861 White House meeting between Abraham Lincoln and 61-year-old Hoosier William Jones, hopeful of securing a patronage position in the new administration. When Lincoln was just “a gangling youth” (Boomhower’s words), Jones had hired him to clerk in his Spencer County store, located in the Little Pigeon Creek community. Lincoln’s duties had included unpacking goods, carrying items up from the cellar, butchering and salting pork, and occasionally driving a team of horses. Jones had also recently participated in the sixteenth President’s successful campaign. Lincoln greeted Jones and a companion, Nathaniel Grigsby, warmly and ushered them into a room to introduce them to First Lady Mary Todd.  Boomhower wrote:

    Before the two men could stake their claims for government jobs, Lincoln, knowing full well what they were after, told his wife: “Mary, you know I’m pestered and bothered continually by people coming here on the score of old acquaintance, as almost all of them have an ax to grind.  They go on the theory that I’ve got offices to dispense with so numerous that I can give each one of them a place. Now here are two friends that have come to pay me a visit just because they are my friends and haven’t come to ask for any office or place.  It’s a relief to have this experience.

Needless to say, Jones and Grigsby went away without even bringing up the real purpose of their visit.

Before the year was out, Indiana governor Oliver Morton commissioned Jones as a lieutenant-colonel to command the 62nd Regiment of Indiana Volunteers. The unit saw action during the siege of Vicksburg, the assault at Kennesaw Mountain, Georgia, and the battle for Atlanta.  On July 22, 1864, despite having been shot in both thighs, Jones remained on the battlefield.  While assisting in the guarding of Rebel prisoners, a cannonball decapitated him.

Politics Ain't Beanbad

“In Chicago we respect the sanctity of the fix.  When a bribe is accepted, you can usually expect to get your money’s worth, which is not something that can be said about most goods and services. Chicago is a city where a man’s fix is his bond. With rare exceptions, when you buy somebody, they stay bought.” Mike Royko

The phrase “Politics ain’t beanbag” is from a section in “For the Love of Mike,” an anthology featuring Chicago columnist Mike Royko (1932-1997), who labored most of his career for the Sun-Times and the Daily News.  In Chi-town politics was definitely of the hardball variety.  Royko first came to my attention upon the publication of his devastating 1971 skewering of Mayor Richard J. Daley titled “Boss,” which remained on the New York Times best-seller list for 26 weeks. First elected in 1955, the six-term mayor ruled the “Windy City” using strong-arm tactics against critics and exacting total loyalty from precinct captains, department heads, judges, and most aldermen. Known in retrospect as the last of the big city bosses, Daley had seen his reputation plummet as a result of the so-called police riot during the1968 Democratic National Convention, when he was caught on camera reacting to Senator Abraham Ribicoff’s expressions of outrage over the use of “Gestapo tactics” in the streets of Chicago by mouthing the words, “Fuck you, you Jew son of a bitch, you motherfucker, go home.”  Even so, he remained a power broker widely feared, especially within his urban domain.

  Reviewing “Boss” for the New York Times, historian and radio personality Studs Terkel declared that Royko was Chicago’s “most incisive and independent journalist since Finlay Peter Dunne, who writes with a street wit, an elegant irony, and a cool, though far from detached, indignation.” His “stunning portrait,” Terkel concluded, “probes not only into the psyche of a neighborhood bully but into the city that has so honored him.”  My most vivid memory of reading “Boss” is the rampant cronyism that saturated City Hall, with loyalty valued over competence when it came to the qualifications of those in positions of authority As Royko wrote in one reprinted column: Hizzoner runs his city “like a small family business and keeps everybody on a short rein. They only do what they know is safe and that which he tells them to do.”  He added: “You can make money under the table and move ahead, but you are forbidden to make secretaries under the sheets.  He has dumped several party members for violating his moral code.”

One hilarious column dealt with over 200 Chicagoland National food stores banning “Boss” after Mrs. Richard J. Daley spotted copies on display while shopping at her neighborhood grocery.  Calling the book “trash” by an “underdeveloped underachiever,” Eleanor Daley first turned a promotional cardboard sign face down, then turned each book around so the title didn’t show, and finally informed the manager that she’d never shop at the store again unless he removed the offensive paperbacks.  Next day, National’s other outlets followed suit.  Royko joked, “National better damn well hope that Mrs. Daley doesn’t take a dislike to their milk or eggs.”

Because Daley was known for his malapropisms and frequent butchering of the king’s English, his press secretary Earl Bush once, according to Royko, told reporters, “Don’t print what the Mayor said, print what he meant.” Probably the most infamous verbal blunder was in defense of Chicago’s men in blue after they pummeled antiwar demonstrators during the Democratic convention: “The police are not here to create disorder; they’re here to preserve disorder.” Of his press adversaries, Daley complained, “They have vilified me; they have crucified me; they have even criticized me.”  Finally, this paean: “We shall reach greater and greater platitudes of achievement.”

Day in a Life

  “Only a man in a funny red sheet

    Looking for special things inside of me.”

    “Superman (It’s Not East).” Five for Fighting

 

    Previous Steel Shavings focused on decades of the twentieth century and then one on the year 2000, featuring student journals as well as my own.  In 2003 I organized an issue around a single week-end, the Ides of March. That happened to be when the United States invaded Iraq on the false pretense that Saddam Hussein stockpiled weapons of mass destruction. I considered basing one on a single day but decided that was impractical, even though mundane journal entries might be of use to future historians. For that debatable reason, here are my activities for May 19 (sans several bathroom visits or morning and evening pill consumptions), beginning with brushing my teeth and splashing warm water on my face. With predictions of summery weather I picked out a red shirt, short-sleeved, for the first time this year.

 

While dressing I listened to “Mully and Haugh” on WSCR (The Score) excoriate White Sox manager Tony LaRussa, age 76 and a Hall of Famer, for criticizing rookie Yermin Mercedes. With Chicago leading 15-4, the Twins used infielder Williams Astudillo on the mound in the ninth inning.  When the count went to 3-0, LaRussa put on the take sign, but Mercedes hit a pitch thrown under 50 mph over the centerfield wall for a home run, then needlessly celebrated while rounding the bases. Obeying a manager’s signs is something players commonly learn as youngsters, and LaRussa called Mercedes clueless. Ageist radio jock Mike Mulligan, who has been on LaRussa all year for being out of touch with today’s player-driven game, claimed that Sox players might get demoralized and that LaRussa was inviting Minnesota to retaliate – as if they were looking for LaRussa’s permission. Despite all Mulligan’s moaning and groaning, the Sox, despite having lost two of their best players to possible season-ending injuries, have one of the best records in baseball.

 

As is my custom I watched the first 20 minutes of CBS Morning News co-hosted by Gayle King (who always refers to Wednesday as Humpday), Anthony Mason, and Vladimir Duthiers (substituting for Tony Dokoupil, on baby leave). Hostilities have erupted again between Israel and the Palestinian group Hamas, and Republican Congressional leaders are balking at the creation of a bipartisan commission to examine the January 6 attack of the Capitol.  Normally my breakfast on week days consists of fruit, cereal with blueberries and banana slices, a sausage link or bacon slices, and two cups of coffee. Because I’d be playing bridge at Banta Senior Center and not have lunch, save for a small cup of jello, I had bacon and two scrambled eggs plus an English muffin topped with strawberry preserves, a Christmas present from daughter-in-law Delia. 

 

For the past two weeks Banta Center volunteers took everyone’s temperature upon arrival and asked people to wear masks, but this week there were no restrictions. In duplicate I partnered with Naomi Goodman, first time she and I played together, and we finished around 50 percent, good for seventh out of 14 couples.  We started slowly, but near the end bid and made game two hands in a row, the only couple to do so, for high boards. 

 

When bridge ended, I gave a copy of my latest Steel Shavings, “Life in the Calumet Region during the Plague Year, 2020,” to life master Judy Kocemar, whom I mentioned in volume 50 because we won a game last January and she attended my Art in Focus talk in Munster on 1960 Rock and Roll Music on March 10, literally days before everything virtually shut down. Don Geidemann and Judy Selund have decided to host a bridge game at his place in June involving four couples, including Herb and Evelyn Passo, Charlie Halberstadt and Naomi, and us. We’ll first have lunch at Pesto’s and before the final round enjoy a homemade dessert (Don is a great cook). On the way out I noticed that someone had brought daffodil plants, so I took about eight of them to plant in our backyard garden.  It had rained earlier, so it didn’t take long.  The trip home took longer than usual because road construction (omnipresent this time of year) had without adequate warning blocked the entrance ramp to Indiana State Road 49, necessitating traveling south a few miles and turning around on Route 2.

 

Niece Lisa visited from Granger and had lunch with Toni at Lucrezia’s but left before I arrived. She brought Toni’s parents’ wedding picture, which had been in possession of her mother (Toni’s older sister), who died a couple months ago from pancreatic cancer, plus letters Toni and I had written to her parents, including one of mine to brother-in-law Sonny, a truck driver, on October 12, 1970, less than two months after we’d moved to Northwest Indiana and I’d begun my teaching career at IUN. I mentioning our playing golf and inquired about his becoming a Teamster union steward, noting, “It’s good that management has to contend with someone who will put them on their ass once in a while.” Then I mentioned how teaching was going:

 All my classes are on Monday and Thursday, so during the rest of the week I can prepare lectures and work on articles (necessary for tenure).  I teach three courses, one at 8:30 A.M., one at 2:30, and the third at 7. My afternoon class is small and has been exciting at times, with good discussions.  The evening class is in an auditorium, where 105 students sit above me (like Roman judges at a gladiator contest) while I teach at a stage-like area.  At first, I was nervous as I passed students on the way up front. After a minute, people in the back claimed they couldn’t hear me, even though I thought I was yelling.  Since then, however, that class is my favorite.  I use the same material as at 8:30 and leave out things that hadn’t gone well then.  In fact, the room transforms me into something of an actor and I have become somewhat of a ham.

    Toni is decorating curtains with peace signs and sayings.  Come out and see them sometime if you get a haul out our way. Fondly, Jim

 

Checking Facebook, IUN chancellor Keen Iwama announced that the university will be back to normal for the Fall semester and open for business on August 2. I noticed that, as usual, it’s been a busy week for Dave, a teacher, tennis coach, and senior class adviser at East Chicago Central.  He posted a photo of seniors honored at a sports banquet and a video of him playing the piano for English Arts teacher Aaron Duncil, a Portage H.S. and VU graduate, singing “Superman (It’s Not Easy)” that they performed at the Student Government banquet.  The 2002 hit was written and performed by Vladimir John Ondrasik III, a huge L.A. Kings hockey fan, who called his group Five for Fighting, a term for penalties meted out to pugilists on the ice. Among the Facebook friends Aaron and I have in common are Performing Arts instructors Kevin Giese and Mark Baer, so I surmised correctly that Aaron has remained active in theatrical productions. 

 

Upper Dublin classmates Connie Daemon and Pat Zollo mentioned that a mini-reunion took place at Guiseppe’s in Ambler with 16 people in attendance including a few spouses and siblings. The sad news: Jim Coombs suffered a stroke and is “recovering but not doing well,” whatever that means.  Susan McGrath’s husband Joe’s recovery from a stroke is painfully slow, causing him frustration and her much anguish over how costly a physical therapist is.  On Mother’s Day, she reported, the PT was helping a granddaughter with her Spanish.

 

While enjoying a couple 16-ounce Coors Lights, I read a few articles on the Cubs by Chicago Sun-Timescolumnist Mike Ryoko (1932-1997) that appear in the anthology “For the Love of Mike.” So-called “lovable losers” during Ryoko’s day, he wrote that the only pennant-winning team in his lifetime consisted of “a bunch of wartime 4-Fs, but at least we had the best 4-Fs” – at least until the 1945 Tigers beat them in the World Series, 4 games to 3. The star player of Ryoko’s youth, Stan Hack, was “always drunk or hung over.”  Due perhaps to a deformed middle finger, shortstop Roy Smalley would often “heave the ball completely over the first baseman’s head and the dugout.” During the 1950s a top prospect married starlet Mamie Van Doren and never made it out of spring training, as did a 38-year-old rookie with a gold earring. His favorite skipper, Leo Durocher, “could kick foul-ball powder on an umpire’s shoes better than any other manager.”

 

Having completed Bradford Pearson’s “The Eagles of Heart Mountain: A True Story of Football, Incarceration, and Resistance in World War America,” I found a Washington Post review by Samuel G. Freedman, titled “At a shameful detention camp, an improbable football team.” Freedman compares the feats of the Heart Mountain football team, led by Tamotsu “Babe” Nomura and George “Horse” Yoshinaga (they met while their families were imprisoned at Santa Anita racetrack) to the Notre Dame teams of the 1920s as a counteracting force against anti-Catholicism and the Florida A & M squads of the 1960s promoting racial pride and equality. Despite losing their freedom due to Franklin Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066, Japanese-Americans became subject to the draft, and 63 members of the Heart Mountain Fair Play Committee, who insisted they were loyal Americans, were convicted and sentenced to three years in federal prison for demanding that their rights as citizens be restored as a condition of their serving in the military.

 

Switching to Coors regular as dinner approached, I sat down to a delicious pork roast meal with mashed potatoes, gravy, salad, and cooked vegetables. Toni has recently completed “Queen’s Gambit” by Walter Tevis, which I had gotten from the library just four days before, so after a few hands of bridge with Toni (we’d each bid two of the four hands and the person getting the bid would play the hand) and before retiring into the bedroom to watch the Cubbies, I read a few pages and see how so many readers got hooked.  Orphaned at age eight, young Beth is sent to a home where wards of the state were given two tranquilizer pills a day to “even their disposition.”  Beth’s life is transformed when she becomes fascinated with a chess board that she spots with a custodian in the basement of her new home.