This is the fourth in a series of articles by Staff Writer Chuck Haga, who is retracing the route taken by author John Steinbeck in 1960 that led to the book “Travels With Charley.”
Oscar Roy watched me with suspicion or at least alert curiosity as I walked toward him on Chicago’s South Ashland Av., and it was because he’s black and I’m white. And I was on his street.
And for the first time in these travels, I saw people looking at me as if I was an intruder.
According to the maps, I was still in America. But this tired piece of Chicago is part of what writer and social activist Michael Harrington 25 years ago called “the other America,” a poor nation within, disproportionately black, an underclass unable to break from the cycle of poverty because… well, that is our great national debate.
Five people had been shot to death two days earlier within a few yards of where Oscar Roy and I met. A man named Clem Henderson did most of the shooting until a wounded police officer shot and killed him. The newspapers described a violent and lonely man who was still haunted by his year of duty in Vietnam, an angry man who had big trouble with drugs and alcohol and shell fragments. But he had trouble with being poor and out of work, too, and half an hour before he snapped he was asking for a job.
I told Roy who I was and what I was doing and asked him how people in the neighborhood were doing. Not so good, he said. Then I asked him what had happened with the shooting. Maybe Henderson wouldn’t have killed and been killed, he said, if somebody had given him work.
“You can look for more men going crazy if things don’t get better,” he said. “We need jobs here, some business, and we need our sidewalks fixed. They just shut down a plant over here, 500 jobs. Moved it to Mexico. We need somebody to empty some of these liquor stores and get some business in here. But nobody pays us any attention. We don’t even see the alderman come around here.”
He is 23, fit, a high school dropout and unemployed. Why did he quit school? He needed to work. So why isn’t he working? There’s nothing availiable except minimum-wage jobs, he said, and he can’t make it on minimum wage. So he lives with an aunt and hangs out in her yard, one of scores of able but idle men lounging along the shabby street.
“We’re not bad people, man, just a little bad because we’ve got no work, no support. We need us some business here. Construction, any kind, that’s what I need. But you see, they put the Mexicans above us.”
Harrington traveled the country in the early 1960s, about the same time Steinbeck made his journey with Charley. His book, “The Other America,” was like a bandage torn off a deep and festering wound. It embarrassed the nation, and it helped to bring about the “war on poverty” programs of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations.
This was Harrington’s analysis:
“The poor get sick more than anyone else in the society. That is because they live in slums, jammed together under unhygienic conditions; they have inadequate diets, and cannot get decent medical care. When they become sick, they are sick longer (and) lose wages and work, and find it difficult to hold a steady job. And because of this, they cannot pay for good housing, for a nutritious diet, for doctors.”
They are more vulnerable to drugs and crime, more susceptible to the lure of crime. Even when much of the country prospers, the poor may fall back. “In the midst of general prosperity, there will be types of jobs, entire areas, and huge industries in which misery is on the increase.”
Many Americans say that assessment holds true today. But many others, slipping themselves and resenting the drag of welfare taxes, say the problem isn’t lack of opportunity or compassion but lack of will, discipline, personal responsibility.
Beyond the persistent poverty and despair of an Ashland Av., there is the troubling realization as you walk such streets that in many places this remains a racially segregated country.
It is subtler now, more a matter of economics than law. The poor, often minorities, aren’t so much confined to an area as they are left behind.
I noticed it on Ridge St. in Lackawanna, N.Y., where the people are white until you cross under the railroad bridge toward Lake Erie and then the people are black. You can find such places in many cities. You can find them in Minneapolis and St. Paul.
To get to Chicago, I drove through Gary, Ind., which in 1980 had a population of about 150,000, more than two-thirds black. And then I drove through Hammond, Ind., where, according to the last census, whites numbered more than 84,000 to about 6,000 blacks.
In Hammond, just a few blocks from Gary, I watched children playing soccer. With their parents and coaches and friends, they numbered more than 100 people. They all were white.
The road past the soccer field is 165th St. It used to run into Gary, but seven years ago the city of Hammond built an earthen dike at the border. Hammond said it was to stop floodwaters that brought hazardous wastes from Gary’s industrial dumps. Many people in Gary thought it was more to keep them out, a symbol of racial separation.
“No, that isn’t it,” said Michael Lach, 40, a white steelworker who lives in Hammond, half a block from the barrier. “Maybe if they’d clean it up over there, it could go. But you’ve got your whole whatever, your family and house, right here. I’m all for keeping it stopped up.”
Tom Johnson, a white mechanic who lives just 100 yards from the dike, said drag racers used the street as a speedway. “And the chemicals are bad over there,” he said. “A boy came walking over from there once and he asked me if he could use my hose, for his shoes. One of his shoes was half burned off.”
And not all the bad comes from Gary anyway, Johnson said. The country’s most pressing problem is drugs, he believes, and he doesn’t have to look past his own property for an example. “I’ve got a boy in the pen now for that drugs business,” he said.
What was he sent up for? “Murder. He killed his brother.”
His older son was 20 when the younger one, then 16, shot him in 1979. “Everybody was scared of them when they were on that stuff. They just got into it one day, and the oldest one got himself a gun and then the little one, he got a gun, too, and he shot his brother.”
What should we be doing about drugs?
“It might be too late,” he said. “They’ve got airplanes bringing it in, boats bringing it in. And they raise it here in this country. This might be out of man’s hands now. We let it go too far.
“We should have put the death penalty on dope. Bring back the old hanging tree. You catch somebody with that dope, you hang him out in front of everybody. Some people may say that’s too harsh, but hell, they’re going to kill off a third of our young people anyway.”
Chicago is many wonderful things, symphonies and ballparks and theaters, awesome new buildings and mammoth factories, people of all races doing good and noble things, and sometimes doing them together. You could say that about any great U.S. city. But it felt good to get in the car and look at the map and plot a course for rural Wisconsin.
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“I was unprepared for the beauty of this region, for its variety of field and hill, forest, lake,” Steinbeck wrote of Wisconsin. “The air was rich with butter-colored sunlight, not fuzzy but crisp and clear so that every frost-gay tree was set off.”
At St. Stephen’s Evangelical Church in Beaver Dam, Wis., the Bible reading last Sunday seemed a fitting prelude to that night’s presidential debate. It was from James: “Who is wise and understanding among you? Let him show it by his good life, by deeds done in the humility that comes from wisdom. But if you harbor bitter envy and selfish ambition in your hearts, do not boast about it or deny the truth.”
I almost didn’t get to see the debate. After making camp in the Black River State Forest, I found a TV in the 400 Club off Hwy. 10 by Millston, but the bartender motioned to a couple of guys singing and playing guitar and fiddle. “They just showed up and started playing.” he said, “and I’m not sure when they plan to quit.”
They quit — with a rousing “Orange Blossom Special” — before the debate. But then so did most of the crowd. “We have to get up and work in the morning,” Tom Stenulson said, explaining why he and his wife, Peggy, were skipping the show. “And it’s unimportant what they say anyway.”
The depth and breadth of our contempt for politicians is staggering. “They’re too much entertainers,” a man told me in Vermont. “It seems like they lie a lot,” a Nebraska truck driver said as we talked in Wisconsin. “They all lie,” a man declared with a wave at the 400 Club’s TV, dismissing the debate and returning to the jukebox.
By the nature of politics, people figure, all politicians must be scum. They must perform, compromise. equivocate, suffer the slanders of opponents and the incessant scrutiny of the media. In Sauk Centre, Minn., bus depot manager Lawrence Kaas said that’s why people ignore politics. “You get to the point where you wonder if a good man wants to put himself through that,” he said.
The Stenulsons have opinions on the country, though. They farm and raise cattle, and she also earns a paycheck in town because the farm isn’t making money right now. They had been in an Old West parade that afternoon and still wore vests and chaps, and their horses stomped and whinnied in their trailers.
“The people who work hard around here make a living,” Tom said. “And the only complaint they’ve got is with the people that don’t work, and it seems like they get a check every week.”
“They basically have no incentive,” Peggy Stenulson said. “They guarantee you so many things. You have to have a roof over your head, but they’re just brazen. They expect new clothes, designer jeans. They expect to go sit in the tavern. And I’m sorry, but if you can’t afford it, you can’t have it.”
It cost $12.75 to camp a night in the state forest campground. When a young woman wearing the uniform of Wisconsin’s forest guardians came by to check me in, I told her that seemed a little steep for putting up a tent. She was sympathetic but took my $12.75 anyway.
I was luckier the night before. They don’t normally allow tents in the Aztalan State Park by Lake Mills, but the man there said nobody would fuss since I was alone and didn’t look like a party. No charge.
“You may have some company tonight, though,” he said. “There’s people coming out to look at Mars.”
An amateur astronomer with a powerful telescope had put a notice in the local paper. People came out by ones and twos and extended families to see the red planet with its swatch of blue and its polar ice cap. It was a clear night with a full moon, and sometimes the astronomer sighted on the cratered moon “for the kids,” but of course all the adults lined up for a look, too.
“I didn’t see any mountains or rivers,” an older woman said to her husband after examining Mars, but she wasn’t really disappointed. She clutched her jacket against the crisp night air, looked around and smiled, and spoke again to her partner. “You know, it’s been a long time since I’ve been out in the moonlight.”
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People who are new to the Twin Cities or who can’t handle rush-hour traffic even with practice should appreciate Steinbeck’s experience. “I know it is a shame that I had never seen the noble twin cities of St. Paul and Minneapolis,” he wrote, “but how much greater a disgrace that I still haven’t, though I went through them. As I approached, a great surf of traffic engulfed me, waves of station wagons, rip tides of roaring trucks.” He had planned a route that would bring him into St. Paul on Hwy. 10, then cross the Mississippi three times. “I meant to go through Golden Valley, drawn by its name. That seems simple enough, and perhaps it can be done, but not by me.”
Steinbeck took four hours to get through the Twin Cities because it was unfamiliar ground. Because it is familiar ground for me, I took nearly a day. Then I cruised through Golden Valley to show that it can be done, turned north and found Minnesota preparing for winter.
In Holdingford, Ken Harlander and his boys, Chris and Jesse, stacked six cord of split elm against the side of their house. A woman across the street washed her windows. And at Jim’s Snowmobile and Marine, Jim Paggen prepared some of the 80 snowmobiles that customers have ordered so far. “We’re aiming for 150, so 80 by this time is super,” he said.
But as our great cities have problems, so do our small towns. Perhaps it is unfair to use Sauk Centre as the example, but it also is inevitable because of “Main Street,” Sinclair Lewis’ classic 1920 disparagement of small-town pretension and pettiness. In the Palmer House hotel, in fact, there’s something of a shrine to the notoriety that Lewis brought his hometown, including clippings from the Smithsonian magazine and some of the nation’s great newspapers. The most recent story was in the Washington Post last month, an account of business closings and personal misgivings and professional jealousies, and it has caused some of the locals to wonder once again what to do about the press.
“Welcome them with open arms,” Al Tingley advises. “Sinclair Lewis is a gold mine, and no other town can claim him.”
With Richard Schwartz, Tingley owns and operates the Palmer House, where Lewis worked briefly. He also has written a book, “Corner on Main Street,” which may have irritated as many people in Sauk Centre as the original book did.
“It’s a bitter book,” Tingley said. “I’m fed up.”
The hotel is for sale, he said, partly because local people don’t patronize it. There are 22 places to eat in Sauk Centre now, counting pizza at the Mobil station. And tourists prefer modern motel rooms with waterbeds to the small, antique-furnished period rooms he offers at $16, less if you’ll walk down the hall for your bath.
“I told Dick we could sell off the furnishings, pay what bills we can and close the building, board it up and let it rot. Then people will walk by and see and ask what the hell happened. But they don’t care.”