Travels to “Land of Romance and Adventure”: Gary, Indiana

An Ethno-linguistic Look at Planet Gary

Gloria Ptacek McMillan

GARY TRIP and LIBRARY COFFEE HOUR for Children of Steel book, projected for MARCH or APRIL 2018


Yes, I’m afraid so. We must and thanks for sharing. Planet Gary is so unlike where most people live on the United States that I think using the metaphor of another planet is excusable. There is also “Planet Detroit” and other minor planets in the “Rust Belt” planetary system. Communicating with those of another planet is always a problem.
I have had many such interplanetary encounters with professors about my favorite American poet, Carl Sandburg. But this Chicago poet has never been recognized as being an interplanetary linguist.

Sandburg amazingly attempted in his poetry collection Smoke and Steel in 1915 to make a bridge between earthlings and Planet Gary!


Please read the poem before venting, Professor Savvy.

“The Mayor of Gary” is two planet dialogue. The Mayor is an obvious earthling who dwells in ‘management systems’ (six sigma quality controls, time motion studies, and the whole nine yards), accounting, stock markets, and ballot box stuffing. The physical reality, not to say misery, of Planet Gary inhabitants who barely exist in the grand scheme of things is only a dim mirage in the Mayor of Gary’s field of vision.

Like the Martian and the earthman in Ray Bradbury’s short story “A Night Meeting” in which earth settler on Mars and a Martian stumble across each other at night on a road, each person may look through the other. The poem’s Gary Mayor sees the workers as transparent, almost invisible. They find him similarly unreal. In Bradbury’s story each describes what he sees to the other. The Martian sees flowing canals and the earthling sees desert landscapes. They each insist that only they are real in the only real time. Finally the earth settler and Martian agree that they must be viewing across a time dimension.

In Sandburg’s poem, the Mayor of Gary and a worker may even try to reach out and shake the hands but they find that their hands go through empty space. Read the poem again with the interplanetary linguistics aspect as your lens to see how this process operates.

BELOW: PLANET GARY AS “RUINS PORN.” Along with Detroit, Gary is an epicenter of a new photographic genre of “ruins porn” that is bringing some photo-tourist dollars into Gary. Smaller East Chicago, IN, shows less building stock devastation. Likewise, smaller Whiting is somewhat damaged by industrial setbacks but not full of thousands of deserted buildings.

There are so many amateur “ruins of the Rust Belt” videos on YouTube that an industry is growing. Who watches these videos? The Ruins Porn videographers need their own Academy Award: the Steel Phoenix! Whether or not the industry revives, they are creating a new cultural voice.

PLANET GARY’S Thousands of abandoned buildings. (Videos)

LINK: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQ3z7a4lC60

(Some wobbly camera shots but goes right around town. It’s got heart.)

Gloria’s rating ***

LINK: More professionally-shot footage, longer, with historic photos mixed in

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnJsv46c8rw

Gloria’s rating ***1/2

Projects are mentioned: Stewart House Urban Farms and Gardens Project.
“Gary’s time” house renovating project using ex-offender labor. Some good references

to social justice and self-help projects at end of film.

BELOW: Librarians (?) with sign announcing the 2011 closure of main public library in Gary, Indiana.


“What? You want to hold a coffee hour for the Children of Steel book in a Gary public library? How about at Indiana University Northwest Campus? At least there your car will be still parked where it was when you come out.”
One friend said this. She is African American and does not do gigs at libraries in Gary, apparently. I saw footage in the “ruins porn” video above of my favorite downtown (now defunct) Gary library.

1967-1970: I used to wait for the Shoreline Buses there in the main downtown Gary bus station a block from the Gary Main Library. Some days I got out in late evening, perhaps nine or ten at night, on my way from Indiana University Northwest Campus on Broadway.
One night, I came out of the station to the bus pull-out area with a briefcase full of library books as huge soft snow flakes were just starting to fall in front of the mercury vapor street lights. Moist floppy flakes were just floating down casually. I looked up and they dotted my face. The little area was silent with snow. James Joyce wrote a story in Dubliners called “The Dead” that I may have been reading, which ends with snow falling.

Friday night! I had some books and the snow was putting on a real spectacle as I hopped the East Chicago bus. I still enjoy that memory.

IU Northwest is my alma mater (B.A.) and will be fine for a coffee hour, if they are willing, but that downtown Gary library would have been my pick for our spring book coffee hour.

Speaking good old IU, Indiana University Northwest's Earl Jones, associate professor of minority studies, is confident that revitalization can be realized in Gary through the region's collective vision, energy and resources. One local group already highly connected and invested in the revitalization efforts of Gary is the nonprofit organization Central District Organizing Project (CDOP), which Jones collaborated with recently on its summer youth program. They have run historic bus tours to places like the boyhood home of Michael Jackson with student guides.

Gary is a city in Lake County, Indiana, United States, 25 miles (40km) from downtown Chicago, Illinois.

The population of Gary was 80,294 at the 2010 census. Gary has experienced drastic population loss, falling by 55 percent from its peak of 178,320 in 1960.

The racial makeup of the city was 84.8% African American, 10.7% White, 0.3% Native American, 0.2% Asian, 1.8% from other races, and 2.1% from two or more races. Hispanic or Latino people of any race were 5.1% of the population. Non-Hispanic Whites were 8.9% of the population in 2010,[31] down from 39.1% in 1970.
The median income for a household in the city was $27,195, and the median income for a family was $32,205. Males had a median income of $34,992 versus $24,432 for females. The per capita income for the city was $14,383. About 22.2% of families and 25.8% of the population were below the poverty line, including 37.9% of those under age 18 and 14.1% of those age 65 or over.

Ethnographic note: Rust Belt Humor is Bleak Humor as opposed to Black Humor.

Sometimes humor can make people sad because a humorist can misread and mis-estimate an audience. What makes people laugh who get up each day and look at these scenes above may just depress others. But this is because the rhetorical situation is different for Planet Gary inhabitants than audience members from places less filled with industrial Angst.

Bleak humor for us (my first 23 years in East Chicago, IN, and frequent visits makes me still part of ‘us’) is a jolly way to lighten our day. Jokes about steel mill rats large enough to place a saddle on, for instance, have been duly numbered and catalogued by Indiana University folklore teams.

“But why, for heaven’s sake, do you dwell on these blighted scenes when there are so many beautiful points of nature and art?” people may ask. This is a good question worthy of consideration. A trained reporter might say, I study and depict these things just to correct the ignorance and misrepresentation about the place. An artist who also attempts ethnographic context will be more likely to say that she feels so deeply about scenes of her formative years that nothing else in her life touches her so much as just these places. Can she counterfeit
what she doesn’t feel about places known only later? Why? Motivation usually inspires choice of topic. Writers find a place. Emile Zola reacted to questions of why he chose such unsavory topics and locales, explaining that he wanted to shine the light of truth where there had been “perfumed lies.”

For us, a bit of humor helps as we live in our habitat of Planet Northwest Indiana.

Trees do grow in Gary and even at the edges of steel mills. Not all artists and ethnographers will balance their views of the industrial ambience with the local animals and plants, other than steel mill rats large enough that one can place a saddle on them (an overworked theme.)


BELOW: Rats in a tender moment: some people find rats quite intelligent and as affectionate as dogs. Of course, the nickname given to people from Northwest Indiana is “Region Rats.” The region is the Calumet Region, named for the Calumet River, which runs through Lake Country, Indiana. This is probably an offshoot of the nickname for people who work into the steel mills: “Mill Rats.”
NOTE: “those in the know” often say these tired cliché names and folk tales about the urban black rat (Rattus rattus) and the urban brown rat (Rattus norvegicus) begin to affect the refined listener like an emery board drawn across the refined listener’s front teeth.

There are also reports of beavers and raccoons taking up residence in corners of operational steel mills in both East Chicago and Gary. There are beaches and rivers with shore birds. And more. There are thousands of cormorants in the Arcelor Mittal steel mill beach in Indiana Harbor, my home town.

“With more than 2,000 nests, the only significant cormorant nesting colony in the lake’s southern basin is in East Chicago, Indiana, at the site of a steel mill. The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service helped the scientists get access to the privately owned location.”

http://greatlakesecho.org/2016/06/06/can-cormorants-help-control-great-lakes-invaders/

NEW RESEARCH (!) The Calumet Region’s Steel Closets

Anne Balay, a Gary ethnographer who works at US Steel, has conducted a survey of gay (LGBT) steel workers. This collection of their oral histories should help to dispel some misinformation and confirm other views about the culture in steel mills. Some people are closeted, some are out. Some LGBT workers manage to negotiate this masculine environment.
She had been a mechanic and wearing her jacket to bars invited more conversation than looking like an English professor. She summed up that this mechanic’s background: her hands, her jacket, her self-presentation, and her sense of humor (mill rat jokes?) made her acceptable in this working-class environment.

I have just sampled this text but intend to read it online from the university library.

NOTE: Too many to list here, but various ethnic histories of Gary are easy to find. Greeks, African Americans, Croatians, Ukrainians, Serbs, Italians, Poles, Chican(x), Hungarians, Germans, Irish, and so on.

Greer, Edward. Big Steel: Black Politics and Corporate Power in Gary (1979).

Jones, Earl R. et al. Midtown: the Central District Life, History and Culture : the Historic African American Community, Gary, Indiana: (2005).