FOCUS/midwest SPRING 2010 by Roland Klose

FOCUS/midwest Founded in 1962 by Charles L. Klotzer

Track south of Curran, Illinois

SAMPLE ISSUE / SPRING 2010

FOCUS/midwest Founded in 1962 by Charles L. Klotzer

TABLE OF CONTENTS

SPRING 2010

“All nature was in a state of dissolution” / Jeanne G. Hawkins

Reflections of a radio demagogue / Bernard Eismann

Fighting for the integrity of expression / Irving Dilliard

Death in Venice: Following the trail of unanswered questions / C.D. Stelzer

Climate bill: “Largest corporate welfare program” in history? / Peter Downs

The changing world of communications / James L.C. Ford

“Labor must get on the march” / Walter P. Reuther

John Knoepfle: “Poems do have a way of creeping around” / Harry Cargas

Midwest grape growers note rising temperatures / Roland Klose

A green economy without U.S. manufacturing / Peter Downs

A Round Barn tale: Jerry and his thingie get zapped / Jacqueline Jackson

God bless Wallace Berry, and other soldiers’ stories / Doug Bybee

The quiet children go shopping / Gloria Pritchard

Remembering Frank O’Hare / Irving Dilliard

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Find FOCUS/midwest online at focusmidwest.com E-mail FOCUS/midwest at focusmidwest@yahoo.com Follow FOCUS/midwest on Facebook and Twitter

“All nature was in a state of dissolution” IT HIT NEW MADRID, MO., on Dec. 16, 1811, at 2 in the morning. Settlers ran terror-stricken from tottering and falling buildings to find the earth belching forth great volumes of sand and water. Stores and houses fell into great fissures. The river rose five or six feet in a few minutes. Its color changed to a reddish hue and became thick with mud roiled from its bottom. The surface of the Mississippi was covered with foam and the jets on the shore went higher than the treetops. Within five minutes, the clear serene night became overcast and purplish. The air was filled with a dense, sulfurous vapor that left the inhabitants gasping for breath. The overcast stayed until daybreak; aftershocks (twenty-seven of them) occurring every six to ten minutes accompanied by sudden flashes of fire brought a night full of horror. The fissures ran from southeast to northwest. People felled trees across the direction of cleavage and hung to the trunks to keep from being buried alive. The churchyard with its dead was gone. The great fissures bared the bones of gigantic mastodons and ichthyosauri. Between New Madrid and Vick’s Plantation, now Vicksburg, there wasn’t the sign of a town remaining along the 300-mile stretch of river. Chimneys were thrown down in Cincinnati. Doors and windows were rattled in Washington, D.C. A church bell rang in Boston and plaster cracked in Virginia and the Carolinas. The three major shocks on Dec. 16, 1811, Jan. 23, 1812, and Feb. 7, 1812 were felt over an area of 1 million square miles. It was felt at the headwaters of the Missouri and Arkansas rivers and on the Gulf of

Mexico and in Canada. Jared Brooks at Louisville recorded 1,874 shocks between Dec. 16 and March 15. Aftershocks were felt for more than a year and it almost two years before complete cessation. It had not been a favorable year in the West. Hunters were alarmed when the squirrels started migrating in herds from north to south. There had been heavy spring floods with the accompanying diseases. A comet of intense brilliancy had appeared in September only to disappear the night of the quake. Superstitious backwoods men recalled a total eclipse of the moon in September.

There had been no warning. Fortunately, there was little loss of life because of the thinly populated area. Between the Mississippi and the Great Plains, Indians reported forests were overthrown and rocks split in two. An English traveler and botanist, Bradbury, had moored for the night about 150 miles below New Madrid. He was wakened by a tremendous noise. The Mississippi was in such a state of agitation that he feared the boat might upset. The noise he described as being inconceivably loud. “I could hear trees falling and screaming wild fowl, but the boat was still safe at mooring. By the time we got to our fire in the stern, the shock had ceased, but the perpendicular banks both above and below us began to fall into the river in such masses as to nearly sink our boat.” They sent men ashore who found a chasm

about four feet wide and eighty feet long. The banks had sunk two feet and at the

ends of the chasm, they had fallen into the river. Bradbury’s party had been saved by mooring to a sloping bank. They embarked when this bank appeared to be moving into the river. Aftershocks made the trees on both sides shake violently and the banks in several places fell, carrying trees with them. “The terrible sound of the shock and the screaming of wild fowl produced the idea that all nature was in a state of dissolution.” Between Cairo and the mouths of the White and Arkansas rivers, the ground rose and fell in great waves, making new lakes, leaving swamps and river beds dry. One of the largest of these earthquakeformed lakes is Reelfoot in Tennessee, which is sixty to seventy miles long and three to twenty miles wide. Here forest trees had fish swimming through their branches and tortoises crawling through cane brakes. The water is clear as a mountain stream in contrast to the yellow Mississippi water. . .. While there is reason to anticipate a recurrence, which could cause serious damage to such places as Cairo and Memphis and minor damage to St. Louis, it is well to remember that no place on earth is earthquake proof. – Jeanne G. Hawkins Excerpted from “The day the Mississippi ran backwards,” published in the November 1963 edition of FOCUS/Midwest. F/m

Reflections of a radio demagogue During the Great Depression, an estimated 50 million people tuned into Father Charles Coughlin’s radio programs, which were known for their ultraconservative denunciations of the Roosevelt administration and poorly concealed anti-Semitism. Coughlin left the airwaves in the early 1940s. Nearly a quarter-century later, FOCUS/Midwest contributing editor Bernard Eismann interviewed Coughlin, and found a substantially different man. THE WHITE-HAIRED PRIEST, cassock skirts flapping, moved with short, quick steps along the snow-spotted pavement that runs parallel to broad Woodward Avenue in the Detroit suburb of Royal Oak. As he turned to enter the church his ruddy face, hardly showing seventy-one years, was brought into sharp relief against the gray stone background of the Shrine of the Little Flower that dominates the corner with a 150foot tower supporting a stone image of Christ on the Cross. The priest is the Rev. Charles Coughlin, a living ghost of the angry Thirties, described in a chronicle of the decade as the master in “the arts of vituperation and demagoguery.” In his study the radio priest of the Thirties, whose vein-straining oratory enraptured hundreds of thousands more than two decades ago, recently talked after keeping silent since 1940. The fire is not gone after the years of public exile, but Coughlin has mellowed, suffering no longer from what he calls the arrogance of youth. Apparently, he has changed with age and he sound quite different from what he was in the late Thirties when Coughlin, his theories of “Social Justice” and his companions on the fringes of American political sanity fed the fires of antiSemitism and hatred already smoldering through large segments of the frustrated and frightened middle classes. Coughlin started invoking his invective against the “modern pagans who have crucified us upon a cross of gold” in 1926 and by 1935 the Jew-baiting in

his radio talks and in print was barely disguised. His following grew along with the flow of nickels, dimes, and dollars that built him and the Shrine of the Little Flower into forces to be reckoned with. In 1940, however, the curtain drew tight. The Post Office banned his magazine from the mails for printing Nazi propaganda and the Church finally imposed a censorship that he was unable to break. . . . We talked in the richly comfortable lower floor dining room at his Royal Oak rectory, and Coughlin carefully measured his words and his tone. F/M: Your career has been characterized as one of “vituperation and demagoguery.” How do you meet this criticism? Coughlin: I committed an egregious error, which I am the first to admit, when I permitted myself to attack persons. I could never bring myself to philosophize the morality of that now. It was a young man’s mistake. F/M: What general observations of that period and of what you were trying to accomplish do you have now? Coughlin: No clergyman has business injecting himself into the practical side of politics. I could have done much better had I been more mature in my thinking at the time,

and I could have accomplished much more if I had retained the advocacy of my principles. F/M: This is a remarkable admission. Coughlin: I don’t think so. Every man has to mature a little bit, and make an act of contrition sometime during his life, because there is no human being perfect. . . . F/M: There is a considerable degree of noise in the country these days about a movement generally called the Far Right. . . . Am I correct in saying that those who have described themselves as extreme conservatives are incorrect in striving to return to a more traditional economic system? Coughlin: Principles are principles. Two and two the four will always obtain, and thievery will always be considered an immorality. Those principles will remain; but, nevertheless, the application of those principles has to be reviewed once in a while. [The Far Right] is always so fearful that we’re going to become bankrupt, always fearful that the federal debt is going to become unmanageable. Well, in my concept of things, I think the federal debt should be put into orbit and let it stay there. We admit that it’s there, we’re not going to try to annihilate it. We’ll be content to pay taxes on the interest, and let it be. But why should human beings all over the world, especially our American world, suffer for the lack of federal spending or federal credit for new houses, new factories, new schools, new hospitals? To me, it doesn’t make sense, because, after all, money is simply a man-made instrumentality. F/M: You sound like a liberal Democrat. Coughlin: Maybe I am. Maybe I’m a liberal. A human care comes ahead of financial care, in my estimation. F/M: This area of spending and economic and fiscal responsibility, which was so involved in the things that you preached, caused you, in the Thirties, to be highly critical of the administration of the President. In these years, it’s causing others to be highly critical of the current President. Do you feel that

the degree of criticism of the chief executive should remain high, or should it abate? Coughlin: Well, in my opinion, the President is living in a glass house, and the binoculars of all the nation constantly train upon his every action, his every thought. He knows that. All of us know it. And in our system of doing things, we have a right to inspect him. That’s Americanism. But we haven’t a right to oppose his actions to the extent that we attribute maliciousness to him or evil — “selling out to Castro, selling out to Khrushchev” — I think that’s horrible to accuse Mr. Kennedy of those things. After all, he has a wife, he has children, he has assets in this country, he has a good moral background with good training. . . . He is just as anxious for the maintenance of the United States as you or I. . . . F/M: For the last 21 years, you have been seldom heard outside your parish in Royal Oak. What is it, if anything, that at this time makes you feel more free to express yourself? Coughlin: I’m not necessarily free. I’m just an ordinary citizen now, having attained this three score and ten with the powers of observation that a younger man lacks. You see, when you gain not your majority, but your senile maturity, if I may put it that way, you really can reappraise things. F/M: Has it been for you personally, then, an almost agonizing reappraisal? Coughlin: No, no, no, no. It’s not agonizing at all. I think it’s the humilities that an old man acquires. A young man knows nothing or very little about it. F/M: About humility? Coughlin: Yes. Excerpted from Bernard Eismann’s “Reflections of a radio priest,” published in the February 1963 edition of FOCUS/Midwest. At the time, Eismann also was the Chicago-based Midwest correspondent for CBS News. F/m

Fighting for the integrity of expression THE ABOLITIONIST ELIJAH LOVEJOY was the first American editor to die in defense of freedom of the press. Very few have been called to follow him since the transplanted Yankee’s blood ran out on the cobblestones of Alton, Illinois. Today freedom of the press calls on editors to live for integrity of expression rather than to die for it. An editor who exemplifies the daily living free press is William Theodore Evjue, editor and publisher of the Madison, Wis., Capital Times. White-haired Bill Evjue reached the age of 80 on Oct. 10 [1962]. Thus he has lived more than twice the lifespan of Elijah Lovejoy. But there is much in common in their careers and in their intense devotion of their own concepts of honor and truth and the welfare of their fellow men. Evjue told the story of his mother and father, Nils and Mary Erickson Evjue, immigrants from Norway, in his page 1 column “Hello Wisconsin,” on his eightieth birthday. He told how they made their new home in the lumber country, surrounding Merrill, Wis. There Bill Evjue was born. He did the hard work of a small town Midwestern boy, and then worked his way at the University of Wisconsin where he became a devoted admirer of the first Senator Robert Marion La Follette – “Old Fighting Bob” who led the liberal and progressive forces in the first quarter of this century. Evjue started his newspaper career as a cub reporter on the Milwaukee Sentinel back in 1905. He was business manager of the Wisconsin State Journal at Madison in 1917 when its editor launched an intemperate, unjustified attack on Sen. La

Follette. The Wisconsin statesman was opposed to involvement in the war in Europe and this brought the bitter criticism. As soon as this attack on La Follette appeared in print, business manager Evjue went to the editor, protested the attack and then immediately resigned. Almost at once he started The Capital Times. For a year the Madison merchants boycotted the new paper, but its readers and friends sustained it until it could obtain needed legitimate revenue. Last April [1962], Sigma Delta Chi, the professional journalistic society, honored Evjue by naming him one of its annual fellows. The citation commended him for fighting “for honest government, better politicians, clean journalism and for what he believes would contribute to a better America. He has not been daunted by criticism, by the threat of the Ku Klux Klan, or by rabble-rousing politicians, but has continued since 1917 to public and edit a fearless and independent newspaper. – Irving Dilliard Excerpted from “Lovejoy and Evjue,” published in the November 1962 edition of FOCUS/Midwest. Evjue died in 1969, crusaded against gambling and Joe McCarthy. His paper, The Capital Times, ended its 90year run as a daily newspaper in 2008. F/m

Death in Venice Following the trail of unanswered questions DIANE RATLIFF, a native of Venice, Ill., remembers when the dump trucks first started lumbering up and down Meredosia Avenue in the early 1990s. She then surmised the drivers must have made a wrong turn. “Where the hell were they going?” she asked herself. Nobody informed her or any of the residents of the neighborhood that a radioactive clean-up was taking place down the block. That was 20 years ago, and Ratliff, a special education teacher for the East St. Louis School District, is still searching for answers as to whether exposure to radioactive waste may have affected the health of her family and neighbors. She is among a group of citizens who are now pressing the federal government for an epidemiological study of the area to determine the impact that the radioactive site may have had on public health. In 1989, the Consolidated Aluminum Corp. (Conalco) and Dow Chemical Co. began to quietly clean up a 40-acre site adjacent to a foundry in Madison, Ill., that the two companies formerly owned. The plant and dump site are both located on the boundary between the Metro East cities of Madison and Venice. The clean-up entailed dividing the area into a massive grid made up of hundreds of squares and then using a complicated formula to measure the contamination levels in each of them. To carry out the job,

contractors constructed a laboratory, rail spur and loading station. By the time the project ended in December 1992 more than 105,000 tons of thorium-contaminated slag had been loaded into 978 rail cars and shipped to a low-level radioactive waste facility in Utah, according to a final report prepared for the Illinois Department of Nuclear Safety (IDNS), the state agency responsible for overseeing the clean-up. The 1992 report states: “Because of the proximity of the contaminated area to a residential neighborhood, and the inconvenience that the construction activity imposed upon the neighborhood, the construction was done in a manner such that all contaminated material above natural background was removed and the area was backfilled immediately. ” Larry Burgan, a community activist and former foundry employee, has doubts about that conclusion. “It makes it sound like they were doing the residents a favor,” says Burgan. “But they also could have been 8

doing it quick to get it out of sight [and] out of mind.” Earlier this summer, Burgan and Ratliff’s brother, Calvin Ratliff, canvassed the neighborhood, asking among other things whether residents had ever been informed of the safety risks posed by the radioactive waste or its removal. None of the residents with whom they spoke indicated that they had ever been contacted. Instead, contractors appeared to have launched the first phase of the clean-up without warning. At 8 a.m., March 5, 1990, heavy equipment operators began excavating more than 15,000 cubic feet of radioactively contaminated soil along Rogan Avenue, a neighborhood street that borders the 40acre site. The work continued for the next two days. Contamination in this area was found from six inches to five feet below the surface, according to the final report. To ensure compliance with state safety regulations, Conalco and Dow installed eight air-monitoring stations to measure airborne concentrations of contaminants during the clean-up, but a portable generator that powered one monitor was

stolen early in the clean-up and never replaced. Despite the loss, the work continued and the final report dismissed the significance of the incomplete data. The assessment, prepared by Roy F. Weston Inc. of Albuquerque, N.M., does stipulate, however, that one of remaining air monitors registered high concentrations of radioactivity on numerous occasions and exceeded permissible levels at least three times. But the risk to residents was deemed safe because all the radioactive contaminants were “assumed” to be Thorium 228 and not its more potent sister, Thorium 232. Moreover, concentrations of radioactive airborne contaminants were averaged out over several months to lower the estimated dosage to within established limits set by IDNS. The history of radioactive contamination at the foundry dates back to 1957, when Dow began processing uranium for fuel rods under a subcontract with St. Louisbased Mallinckdrodt Chemical Co., which was working for the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. The plant was one of hundreds of low-priority radioactive sites nationwide identified by the federal government’s Formerly Utilized Sites Remedial Action Program in the 1990s. The subsequent government-mandated clean-up, which was overseen by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in 2000, focused mainly on uranium contamination inside facility and did not include additional monitoring or remediation at the adjacent 40-acre site. The thorium waste was the byproduct of another facet of the foundry’s operations — production of lightweight alloys used for military and aerospace applications. Between 1960 and 1973 Dow dumped millions of pounds of sludge containing 4 to 8 percent thorium behind the plant on the adjacent property. After Conalco took over the operation, the dumping continued for years, including monthly shipments of thorium waste produced at Dow facilities in Bay City and Midland, Mich. 9

Company guidelines also permitted up to 50 pounds of thorium sludge per month to be poured directly down the sewer. The radioactive contamination could also have been released into the environment by the plant’s several 20-foot diameter exhaust fans. The Ratliff family has lived in the brick bungalow at Meredosia Avenue and College Street next to the foundry since 1950. Louis D. Ratliff, Diane Ratliff’s late father, built the house. He died in 1974 from brain cancer. An informal survey of a two-block stretch of Meredosia Avenue conducted earlier this year yielded anecdotal evidence of 44 cases of cancer or lung disease among longtime residents, many of whom are also now deceased. “Before sunset there was always a cloud emanating from the plant,” says Ratliff, who attended elementary school across the street from her family home. The special education teacher now worries about spots

that she says have developed on her lungs. Ratliff also worries about her siblings, whom she says have been diagnosed with sarcoidosis; a debilitating, chronic disease that commonly causes inflammation of the lungs and other organs, and in some cases can be deadly. The clean-up of the site that was initiated 20 years ago did nothing to allay her fears. It only left unanswered questions. “They were supposed to have examined the yards for contaminants,” says Ratliff. “But that didn’t happen.” — C.D. Stelzer F/m

Climate bill: “Largest corporate welfare program” in history? SOME environmental groups and progressive Democrats are denouncing the American Clean Energy and Security Act as a massive subsidy for polluters and a meaningless response to climate change. A day before the U.S. House of Representatives narrowly passed the American Clean Energy and Security Act by a vote of 219-212, seven liberal and environmental organizations mounted a campaign to

defeat the bill. The legislation now moves to the U.S. Senate. The numerous provisions of the bill “do not add up to the steps needed to avert catastrophic climate disruption. Moreover, the bill’s emissions trading provisions create vested interests that would block future reforms,” Tom Stokes, coordinator of the Climate Crisis Coalition, wrote to the coalition members the day before in

urging them to lobby their congressional representatives to vote against the bill. Stokes, who was joined on the letter by Ezra Small, campaign organizer for the Climate Crisis Coalition, argued that cap on greenhouse gas emissions in the bill was far too weak to affect climate, and was rendered meaningless by offsets and allowances in the bill that “could allow U.S. emissions to keep increasing

until 2040.” By overriding the authority of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to regulate greenhouse gases, and overriding stronger state and regional compacts, the American Clean Energy and Security Act “ensures that its failure as climate policy will be catastrophic,” he added. While criticizing the bill for doing nothing about climate change, Stokes also slammed the legislation for funneling $174 billion in subsidies to coal and oil companies and creating a playground for speculators by allowing the selling and trading of carbon credits. The Citizen’s Climate Lobby, the CLEAN Coalition, the Friends Committee on National Legislation, the Progressive Democrats of America, the Carbon Tax Coalition, and

the Environmental Justice Leadership Forum on Climate Change, all adopted similar positions. All of the groups support a simple, revenue-neutral carbon tax over the complicated capand-trade system at the center of the House’s climate change bill. Industry groups generally supported the bill. The American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, a group representing the operators of coal-burning power plants, lobbied for the bill, as did New Jersey gas and electric company PSEG and Entergy Corp., a $13 billion electric power company operating in Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas. They were joined by 20 of America’s largest corporations, including Nike, Starbucks, Duke

Energy, and HewlettPackard, who formed the “We Can Lead” Coalition to lobby for the House bill. Although most news coverage characterized the bill’s opponents as conservatives, who opposed action on climate change, U.S. Rep. Lloyd Doggett, DTexas, said that wasn’t always the case. “This energy bill’s fine print betrays its laudable purpose. The real cap is on the public interest and the trade is the billions from the public to polluters,” Doggett said. Doggett characterized the bill as a step backward on addressing climate change. “An Administration analysis shows that doing nothing actually results in more new renewable electricity generation capacity than approving this bill,” he said. “Vital authority for the EPA is stripped, but 2 billion additional tons of pollution are authorized every year, forever. . . . Exempting a hundred new coal plants and paying billions to Old King Coal leaves him, indeed, a very merry old soul,” he said, adding that the bill is “the largest corporate welfare program in the history of the United States.” – Peter Downs (pdowns@speakeasy.net) Peter Downs is a St. Louisbased journalist who writes frequently on environmental issues. F/m

The changing world of communications This worried report on media consolidation was published in July 1962. The author is James L.C. Ford, professor of journalism at Southern Illinois University-Carbondale.

“Nowhere is the changing world of communications more in evidence than in major metropolitan centers. In Chicago, St. Louis, and Kansas City, therefore, as in other major cities, one finds the epitome of diminishing newspaper competition and the rise of electronic media. The number of one-daily cities increased from 42.2 percent in 1910 to 82 percent in 1954. “Chicago has witnessed the greatest newspaper decline. Sixty years ago, it had five morning papers — the Times-Herald, the Record, the Tribune, the Inter-Ocean, the Examiner. Of these only the Tribune remains. In the Windy City, there were four afternoon dailies: the Post, the Journal, the American, and the Daily News. Of these, only two — the American and Daily News – are left. It is true that the Sun-Times has appeared, representing the consolidation of two papers under the Marshall Field banner. However, the News also belongs to Field and the American now is owned by the Tribune. So in Chicago, we have only two newspaper

ownerships, competing along Lake Michigan and through the hinterland. “Sixty years ago in St. Louis, the morning field was shared between the Globe-Democrat and the Republic. Today there is only the Globe-Democrat, belonging to the Newhouse national chain, the most rapidly growing group in the metropolitan field today. In 1901, the afternoon field was dominated then as now by Pulitzer’s Post-Dispatch but there were three rivals — the Chronicle of ScrippsMcRae, the Evening Star, and the Times. Today all rivalry is over and the P-D stands alone. St. Louis has been reduced from six to two dailies. “In Kansas City, sixty years ago there were the morning Journal and the Times while the Star, the World, and the Post competed in the evening — five dailies in all. Today there are only two left, the Star and the Times, under the same ownership and without any newspaper competition. […]” “These are the fact of life in the communications word. Is the marketplace of ideas dwindling? It is certain that units of communications are being concentrated ever more steadily within a limited control. Newspapers and radio, magazines and movies and TV, they are being bundled together to fit in a single portfolio. No one man has them all in his pocket by any means but fewer and fewer men have packaged more and more papers and stations together conveniently for profit. “Is there a danger point for the American who seeks information to carry out his duties as a citizen? Should there be limits to the control of communications? If so, how should the government function to protect legitimate private interests as well as the overruling public concern?” F/m

“Labor must get on the march” “We are in deep trouble in America, but not because our system of freedom is unequal to the challenge. We are in trouble because we are not trying. We are playing out on the outer fringes of our basic problems, for we have failed to fully comprehend the dimension and the character of the challenge we face.” “Those whom society neglects will not be influenced by pious platitudes about the virtues of American democracy. The unemployed in

America can’t pay their rent, feed their kids or assure them of a decent education with some theoretical economic potential. Their problems will be solved only as American society develops the social mechanisms, policies, and programs which translate technological progress into opportunities for human fulfillment.” “This is the central task of the American labor movement. The labor movement is the only group with economic and political leverage and social motivation. Unless we make this fight, the fight will not be made and American democracy will be unequal to the challenge it faces at home and in the world. That is why American labor must get on the march.” — Walter P. Reuther,“The Trouble with Labor,” published in the April 1964 edition of FOCUS/Midwest. F/m

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John Knoepfle: “Poems do have a way of creeping around” John Knoepfle, the celebrated Midwestern poet and author of more than a dozen books, is unusual in that he’s been the beneficiary of at least two notable features in FOCUS/Midwest. In “What is poetry?” (1973) Knoepfle discussed his work with St. Louis author Harry Cargas; “Midwestern master” (1980) marked Knoepfle’s quarter-century as a poet by examining his major works, Rivers into Islands and The Intricate Land. Knoepfle, professor emeritus of literature at the University of Illinois at Springfield, remains an active and important voice. His latest collection, Walking in Snow, was released in 2008 by Indian Paintbrush Poets. His autobiography, I Look Around for My Life, also was released in 2008 by Burning Daylight. Here’s an except from 1973:

Harry Cargas: What has it meant to you personally to be a poet? John Knoepfle: Well, in terms of a kind of social satisfaction, poems do have a way of creeping around, and every once in a while you hear about some person one of your poems got to. I have a theory about art, that it’s always giving what it doesn’t need to. It’s the one thing you do that when it’s done is totally shared. So it makes me feel good if I hear from somebody, say, in Cedar Rapids who tells me he was in a bar there and suddenly heard a girl quote the last five lines from ‘Heman Avenue Holiday,’ or to know that someone else took the trouble to paint that poem on the kitchen wall, or to get a letter from a student in India telling me that he came across a work of mine that meant something special to him. I have to say I like that.

As for a personal response or satisfaction, things get complicated. It is very hard to keep a steady view of your own work. One minute you feel pretty good about this poem you wrote and the next you want to toss it out the window. I find, too, as I get older that the old arrogance is gone. After all, the world is not waiting spellbound for my latest effort. I find it a little harder to send poems out, a little harder to judge when this or that poem is shaped as well as I can get it. But I do like to write the poems. I like to see them begin to fill out and attached themselves to larger, nuclear units, and I like to try to change them and rework them, get out the bad rhetoric that is often in them — they do get heavily reworked, so much so that I think that often a reader reads right through them without seeing them. F/m

Midwest grape growers note rising temperatures TED WICHMANN still remembers the brutal Super Bowl of 1984, but not for the pounding the Raiders gave the hapless Redskins. Instead, what Wichmann recalls is the wicked deep freeze that destroyed dozens of grapevines that he and his business partners had planted high on a hill near the tiny town of Alto Pass, Ill. All it took was one bitter cold snap, in January 1984, to kill every Chardonnay and Riesling vine, roots and all. “In one day, they were all gone,” Wichmann says. So for the next couple decades, Alto Vineyards and every other southern Illinois grower avoided the better-known but coldsensitive Vitis vinifera grapes, and stuck with more durable, cold-hardy French-American hybrids and native varieties. Now all that’s changing. Grape varietals that once fared poorly in the region are being planted in increasing numbers because of warmer weather. Rising temperatures mean milder winters that no longer pose as big a threat to vinifera, which generally can’t withstand temperatures below 10 degrees Fahrenheit. “In the last seven years, we’ve never gone below zero and last year we went to zero like one day,” Wichmann says. “Except for that day I don’t think we’ve been below 10 above.” Actually, government weather statistics show a couple of near- and below-zero days in the region, especially in the past two winters, but there’s no disputing the trend. Dr. Jim Angel, state climatologist at the Illinois State Water Survey, won’t blame the temperature shift on global warming. “Winters in Illinois warmed from 1895 to the 1930s, cooled off a little into the early 1970s, plunged downward in the late 1970s, and started warming up since then,” Angel says. “However, they are just now reaching

the levels we saw in the period from the 1920s to the 1950s. So it’s hard to know if this is a global warming trend or just a recovery from the cold 1970s.” (There is no dispute, however, that rising levels of greenhouse gasses will heat up the earth in time. In Illinois, average temperatures will be up from 2 to 12 degrees Fahrenheit by the year 2100, according to a study by Angel’s office.) They may not know the cause, but growers don’t need a climatologist to tell which way the temperature gauge is moving. “We can grow some vinifera that we didn’t think, 20 years ago, would survive,” says Paul Renzaglia, who owns Alto Vineyards, the biggest winery on the Shawnee Hills Wine Trail. Wichmann, now a consultant to Blue Sky Vineyard near Makanda, says area growers have enjoyed success with Cabernet Franc, Chardonnay, and Cabernet Sauvignon grapes. Other varietals, such as Viornier, a white grape from France’s Rhône region, are also being tried, he says. Karen Hand, winemaker at Blue Sky, says the Cab Franc is one of the “trickier” grapes to grow, but it’s obviously proven a success, having picked up gold at a number of prestigious wine competitions. Warmer weather also seems to have helped long-established hybrids such as the Chambourcin and Norton, Wichmann says. Longer growing seasons mean riper fruit with more sugar — and that translates into more alcohol, making for a full-bodied wine. “I’d say, if anything, it’s a plus,” Wichmann says. – Roland Klose F/m

A green economy without U.S. manufacturing? WHEN WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY in St. Louis set out to build the “greenest” building in North America, the people involved never expected that the toughest obstacle would be the disappearance of manufacturing from the United States. “On one level, we’ve all heard about the loss of manufacturing, but when you try to reduce your carbon footprint by eliminating unnecessary shipping, it really brings up that we aren’t making anything anymore,” says Daniel Hellmuth, principal in Hellmuth + Bicknese and architect of the Living Learning Center at Washington University’s Tyson Research Center. When staff of the Tyson Research Center — the centerpiece for environmental research and education at Washington University — began planning for their new building, called the Living Learning Center, they decided they had to try and meet the most demanding sustainable building code out there. They accepted the Living Building Challenge from the Cascadia Region Green Building Council, the toughest green building standard in North America. No building has met the challenge yet, but the Living Learning Center is in the running to be the first. The Living Building Challenge sets up 16 requirements that must be met in the construction and operation of a building for the building to qualify as a “living building.” Those requirements cover everything from site selection and construction waste to materials used and energy and water use. The building can’t be built in a flood plain or other fragile environment, for example. It

must generate enough of its own electricity so that when in use for one full year it uses zero net energy from the electric grid or gas lines. It must collect and purify enough water on its own that it uses zero net water, and it must produce zero wastewater (sewage). Tyson Research Center attempts to meet the energy and water requirements of the Living Building Challenge by generating electricity with a rooftop photovoltaic array, replacing traditional flush toilets with composting toilets to eliminate wastewater, and collecting and purifying rainwater to make water for drinking. “The technology is all there, there just has to be a commitment to use it,” Hellmuth says. What isn’t all there is a domestic manufacturing base.

“The offshoring of manufacturing in the last decade is probably as big an event as the industrial revolution,” says Craig Meyer, president of the Society of Industrial and Office Realtors and part of the Los Angeles office of the Jones Lang Lasalle commercial real estate company. It has certainly reshaped the industrial real estate market and redefined industrial real estate as primarily warehouses and distribution centers for products shipped into the United States from overseas.

Offshoring, however, runs counter to the demands of a green economy. In order to reduce greenhouse gases from unnecessary shipping and transportation, the Living Building Challenge sets up mileage limits for the transportation of materials from their place of manufacture. The heavier an item is, the closer it has to be made to the building site to minimize carbon pollution. Metal items, for example, have to be made within 250 miles of the building site. Medium weight items, such as wood for framing, siding, or trim, have to come from within 500 miles of the building site. Smith said that the project team for the Living Learning Center found that complying with the material requirements of the Living Building Challenge for locally made and non-toxic building components was the hardest part of the Living Building Challenge. In fact, they couldn’t do it. They had to get exemptions for many building components. “Ceiling fans aren’t made in this country anymore,” Hellmuth says. Neither are light fixtures, Smith added. “Every light fixture we looked at had some part made in China,” he says. Indeed, “we found that there are a lot of components in building systems that are not made in this country anymore,” Hellmuth says.

And when products aren’t made locally, local distributors often did not know what was in them. The Living Building Challenge has a “red list” of materials it does not allow in products used in buildings designed to meet the challenge. Those materials, including lead, mercury, and PVCs, are banned because of their toxic effects on humans or the environment. “When we asked a lot of distributors if there were any of these materials in their products, they wouldn’t know,” Smith says. Ultimately, the project team had to employ someone to vet products for point of origin and freedom from red-listed toxins. The so-called “toxic Chinese drywall scandal” illustrates problems that can arise from ignorance of product contents. The scandal, affecting anywhere from 100,000 to 3 million home built or renovated between 2004 and 2007, involves drywall, imported from China, that was contaminated with strontium sulfide and other toxic compounds. The strontium sulfide would react with hydrogen in the air to corrode metal and eat through wiring while giving off a rotten egg smell. Homeowners have laid the blame for numerous health problems on the drywall. A class action lawsuit is seeking billions of dollars in damages from home builders, drywall contractors and distributors, and the drywall manufacturers. Some home builders, such as Miami-based Lennar Homes, are in turn suing the Chinese drywall makers. The heaviest use of contaminated Chinese drywall was along the Gulf Coast, but according to the Chinese Drywall Complaint Center, toxic Chinese drywall also has been identified in California, Oregon, Washington, Wyoming, Nevada, Arizona, Iowa, Missouri, Kentucky, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, and Connecticut. The problem with materials is bigger than just a few parts. Panos Kouvelis, professor of operations and manufacturing management at Washington University, says 16

that when regional manufacturers lose business, it affects a whole chain of companies. “When sweaters were made in the United States, manufacturers bought their fiber and supplies from North American companies. The manufacturers were here and so was their supply chain,” he says. After the Asian financial crisis of the 1990s, retailers stopped ordering sweaters from North American manufacturers and placed all their orders with Asian manufacturers. “Quite naturally, Asian manufacturers didn’t buy their fiber from American companies; they bought it from companies close to them.” So, when retailers stopped buying sweaters from North American manufacturers, it not only knocked sweater-making plants out of business, but also knocked out the factories that made acrylic fibers and other supplies for sweater factories. That cascading effect shows up in the numbers. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, one-third of the manufacturing jobs that existed in the United States 10 years ago have disappeared. During the same time, the country’s trade deficit in manufactured goods more than doubled. The loss of capabilities to make products is just the start. Also lost, in addition to the knowledge of what is in products, are the

capabilities to manage production, to know what technology can do, and even the capability to develop better, more environmentally-sustainable technologies. When, for example, SSM Health Care decided to build a model hospital in Fenton, Mo. — as an exemplar of how to deliver hospital care efficiently and effectively — they found they had to go to Asia for some of the most energy efficient building systems. The highly energy efficient boilers they selected for heating the hospital “are pretty new in the United States, but they’ve been used in the Far East for some time,” says Mark Bengard, senior vice president for Murphy Co., the mechanical contractor that helped SSM select and install the system. Environmentalists realizing that U.S. cannot have a green economy, much less become a leader in green technology, if country does not have an adequate manufacturing base. They hope that carbon policies that include the cost of carbon pollution into the cost of transportation will begin to change that. “Part of a healthy green economy is to start making things on a local level again,” Hellmuth says. If so, the push for a new green economy could help revive the old manufacturing economy. – Peter Downs F/m

A Round Barn tale: Jerry and his thingie get zapped ED PFAFF is a long-time worker on the farm. One of his sons, Jerry, is eight. Jerry likes to ride his bike out to the farm and fool around. He’s particularly fascinated with the electric screens on the windows of the round barn. He likes to watch flies get zapped. If there aren’t any flies committing hari-kiri, he’ll take a grass stem and hold it to the screen, and watch it sizzle with a bright blue flame. One day a screen has fallen. It’s lying under the window, partly on the sidewalk that circles the round barn, partly on the grass. It’s still getting power, though; Jerry drops a beetle on it and the beetle takes a long brilliant time incinerating. Jerry looks around. Nobody is in sight. He fumbles with his trousers, pulls out his thingie, and pees on the screen. The jolt throws him to the ground. He has nearly committed hari-kiri, himself. — Jacqueline Jackson (jjack1@uis.edu) This short story is among dozens included in The Round Barn, a forthcoming book about life on a dairy farm near Beloit, Wis. Jacqueline Dougan Jackson is the author of more than a dozen books, including Stories from the Round Barn (1997) and More Stories from the Round Barn (2002). F/m 18

God bless Wallace Berry, and other soldiers’ stories I WAS BORN on July 29, 1941 in Amboy, Ill., a small Midwestern town of 2,000 mostly straightforward and happy souls comfortably isolated in the center of the country, oblivious to the rest of the world. War would soon change all that, but I was too young then to realize how. In fact, my first memory of World War II came near its end. People were gathering in the streets and intersections of Amboy because they’d heard of Japan’s offer to surrender, and my mother took me outside to see. It was the night of Aug. 10, 1945. I vaguely recall that people seemed subdued — adults talked through smiles, children were half asleep. The big celebrations — the drums and bugles and speeches — came a few days later, when Japan’s surrender was formally announced, marking the official end of World War II. Then, after the jubilation and joy, people returned to work, because work is what they did. Years later, I would gather up stories of the war years from my family. Both of my uncles joined the Marines immediately after Pearl Harbor. Ed was 19; John, 18. They would end up with very different experiences. On their first day in boot camp they were one behind the other in a long line of new soldiers getting “shots” — inoculations to prevent yellow fever, smallpox, typhus, and several other diseases. The method then was to walk between “medics” on both sides of the line who would jab large needles into each arm. The single line soon buckled, as recruits succumbed to the pain of the jabs or the heat. A second line was formed to speed things up, but more “medics” were needed. John was given a syringe and an orange, and told to practice. After about two minutes of jabbing the fruit he was declared “a medic in good standing,” and was ordered to start jabbing his fellow recruits. For the rest of the war, John remained in California, administering shots — though he never got any of his own. Later, he was a steel mill worker and a good one. Ed was in the invasion of the first Pacific island to be liberated, and fought in most every other island campaign during the war. He was on a troop ship, preparing to invade 19

Japan, when President Truman decided to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. After the war Ed was a bricklayer and a good one — and to him, Harry Truman was a god. But Ed said little about the war and nothing about combat. That was true of many other veterans of the fighting: Only after they reached their late 70s and early 80s could they bring themselves to tell what they’d endured. Ed died at 72, too young to give his account. My cousin Wallace Berry was 16 years old when I was born. Wallace lied about his age, joined the Navy and was killed in the Philippines. He is buried over there. He was the only child of my Aunt Freda. I have a picture of Wallace in his sailor’s uniform; he’s posed in front of a crude nautical background that looks as if it were painted by a not-so-talented 10 year old. No one knew much about Wallace — including Wallace himself, I suppose — because he lived only 17 years. After Wallace was killed, Aunt Freda (in a time before “divorce”) divorced her husband and moved (in a time when single women stayed close to family) to California where she worked in a defense plant. After the war ended she stayed in California and became a waitress. She lived to be 93 and never much (if ever) again talked about the war or Wallace. She was a striking woman, with beautiful long-and-thick red-auburn hair. My father, Ray “Razz Matazz” Bybee, was married with two children when the war broke out. He was too old to be drafted, so he volunteered! Only a week into boot camp he fell ill and spent the next six weeks in a military hospital where they wouldn’t (or couldn’t) figure out what was wrong. So they sent him home and wiped his slate clean — no military record notes that he had ever been there. Once home, civilian doctors immediately found stomach ulcers, cut him nearly in half, and removed the ulcers — at no small cost. It would take Ray seven years to pay off the medical bills at $2 a week. Forever after, he would claim that Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the Antichrist. God bless ’em all — especially Wallace Berry. — Doug Bybee Bybee is a retired state-government employee in Springfield, Ill., and columnist. He is currently writing a book about his memories for his grandchildren. “It’s not really difficult,” he says, “for I have saved up words all my life – where once I put ’em in a jar, I now put ’em inside a machine.” Contact him at dougbybee@sbcglobal.net. F/m

The quiet children go shopping “SOME BAD THINGS are good to know. Long ago, I had a little grocery store in a very deprived neighborhood in St. Louis. A salesman and I enjoyed many emotionally comfortable talks together when he made his rounds. I must say that race never entered any of our conversations, not even by inference. “One day a boy, around 12 years old, came into the store, followed by two pre-school children, a brother and a sister. The boy wore faded and patched blue jeans, canvas shoes and a raveling old sweater. His blue shirt was unironed but unlike the rest of his inadequate clothing it was clean. The two younger children who accompanied the older boy were not only thin and ragged but also very dirty. They were strangely quiet. The 12-year-old bought one gallon of kerosene, one pound of baloney, a small can of molasses, and one loaf of bread — exactly what he bought the day before and every single school day for the two years I had owned the store. “Both parents worked: the father was a six-day janitor and the mother a five-day-a-week domestic. As a domestic, she was required to be away from home and her nine children 15 hours per day. The 12-year-old got food for the family. They ate cold leftovers for breakfast, and baloney and molasses for lunch. The two preschoolers were left alone all day until the school-age children got home. They ran up and down the street, their noses invariably running, and their thin dirty, smelly clothes giving them a most pathetic look. And always they were so quiet. No laughter ever, but no sounds of any other kind either. ______________________________ “The family lived in three small dark, dirty rooms with a toilet stool set in an unlit, former clothes closet. There was a tiny, beat-up sink in the kitchen. The uncovered wood floors were always dirty with giant splinters threatening every step. The gas and electric had been cut off long before I moved into the neighborhood. The only heat was from the coal space heater in the front room and coal-fed cook stove in the kitchen. With gaping cracks and rat holes everywhere, crumbling plaster and rattling doors and

windows all over, no amount of heat could ever have warmed the place. (Two of the children had been bitten by rats.) The kerosene bought by the boy was used in old-fashioned oil lamps, the only illumination in the house and by which the children studied at night, as much as any half-hungry, half-warm, half-sick, halfclothed, confused, hopeless child can study. Because the mother worked at a different place every day, payday for her was every day, which explains why the purchases were made daily.

“Because the father always got home first, he made supper for the children – usually white potatoes fried with onions, thick strips of salt pork, fried first to provide the fat for frying the potatoes. Bread consisted of fried corn cakes made of corn meal, salt, and hot water. Once a week they had neck bones and black-eyed peas, according to the groceries they bought from me. The mother usually arrived home shortly after nine, when the four youngest children were in bed. They were almost always asleep when she left at 6:30 a.m. in order to make the two-hour trip each way, including the long wait for the county bus to make the turn every 40 minutes. I can’t imagine any lullabies, any story telling, any bedtime baths or goodnight kisses from this tired mother. The father, a lonely failure, would find only a bitter reminder in the faces of his strangely quiet brood. To escape their unasked questions, he would crawl into bed as soon as possible, his face to the cold crumbling wall. “I explained to my friend, the salesman, the family situation and just what the boy would do with the things he bought, and that he was father and mother to his sisters and brothers. That the truant officer (St. Louis had them then) never bothered them about being

out of school. Nor did anyone bother about them playing in the street at night until midnight. My friend was speechless. He just stood and stared, while his face turned gray. Finally, he put the half empty bottle of pop on the counter, wiped his forehead, and quietly walked out. It was two weeks before he returned to the store. He seemed older and deeply troubled. He asked if there were many other families in the neighborhood living like that of the 12-year-old boy, and seemed genuinely pained to learn that many of them were just as bad off. Then he asked me how I could stand living around them. When I told him how difficult it was to find a neighborhood anywhere in a ghetto where some unpleasant human misery does not exist, his color seemed to turn gray again and tight lines formed around his mouth. It was then that he announced with lowered eyes, that he would ask to be transferred to another area. He left without even waiting for my offer. “I never saw him again. I wonder if he ever forgot his old route. And I wonder if I can ever forgive this white salesman.” – Gloria Pritchard Ms. Pritchard’s letter, titled “Reflection,” appeared in the July-August 1968 edition of FOCUS/Midwest. F/m

Remembering Frank O’Hare TWO YEARS HAVE PASSED since cancer took the physical presence of Frank P. O’Hare away from his friends — the exact date was July 16, 1960. Yet the most fortunate of O’Hareians still find him popping into their offices unannounced; spot him bustling along a crowded city street with two or three newspapers tucked under an arm; hear his now dulcet now explosive voice on the telephone; receive in the morning mail those cards and notes and letters and manuscripts and embellished booklets on almost every idea under the sun that could have come from him alone. For Frank O’Hare was a fellow who goes right on doing what he always did and somehow sees to it that nothing, not even death, very much interferes. Since there may be a few readers of FOCUS/Midwest who do not know as much as they should of the O’Hare story, the thing to do here is to touch some of the high spots, and hope that it soon will have the attention of the understanding biographer that Frank O’Hare deserves. He was born April 23, 1877 — it always pleased him to celebrate his

birthday and Shakespeare’s together — in North Hampton, Iowa. His restless energy came as a paternal inheritance. Peter Paul O’Hare, his father, an Irish emigrant, forsook importing lines from his homeland to seek adventure in the Colorado silver mines. When life in the Rocky Mountains became too quiet he packed a satchel and went off to fight on the side of the Boers in South Africa. But Frank’s mother, the former Elizabeth Weyers, a native of the Netherlands, made up for the lack of a steady father as best she could and that was mighty well.

Setting a lot of store by education, she kept her children in school as long as possible and managed to have books in the home. Frank’s older brother, George, ran the New Hampton Courier and it was in its jumbled print shop that Frank, as a four-year-old, learned his ABCs by playing with the large wooden types used in handbills and posters. When Frank was six, Mother O’Hare moved her brood to St. Louis and there Frank carried papers in the Irish neighborhood known as Kerry Patch. In his teens he began his career as a writer and editor by chasing news for the old St. Louis Chronicle, then directed by the great E.W. Scripps, founder of the first national newspaper chain. By the time he had reached his early twenties, Frank was immersed in the politico-economic problems of the Bryan-McKinley era and his hero was Gene Debs, former locomotive fireman and apostle of socialism.

But the movement needed “an unhampered editor” and that was just what Frank O’Hare became as chief of the National Rip-Saw in 1912. Through the next decade he issued its stridently socialistic copies from St. Louis. He took up all the new causes, woman suffrage, world peace, the political prisoners behind bars and, in 1922, on the heels of A. Mitchell Palmer’s “deportations delirium,” set out to free all those who were locked up in the war years because of their political views. His Children’s Crusade for Amnesty included chartered transportation to Washington and picketing at the White House. After World War I he used his mathematical skill as an industrial engineer for a St. Louis hat company. More or less until he was 70, he was a consultant to the president on efficiency and procedures for which

Frank himself became a Socialist organizer and he and his first wife, Kate Richards, traveled through Arkansas and Oklahoma setting up annual encampments for farmers and laborers under Socialist auspices. The idea was to provide recreation for entertainment-starved families and along with it serious study classes in Socialist doctrine and practice. By 1908, these encampments were drawing thousands of southwest farmer folk.

he worked out early time studies. A heart attack retired him but not to the sidelines. He still had more things to do. Long a leading member of St. Louis’ famed Public Questions Club, angular, hawk-beaked Frank O’Hare now formed a Monday luncheon group which he called The Dunkers. To record its exploits he started a “yellow sheet,” Dunkerdoings which went to honorary members overseas and to members on leave around the world in World War II. Justice Wiley B. Rutledge and U.S. Sen. Thomas C. Hennings Jr. were among its readers. Frank often sent letters to the newspapers and a collection of these would be a delight in anyone’s hands. At the peak of a controversy in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 1951 over the quality of Missouri hams, the former battler of The Rip-Saw wrote, under the title “When Pigs Died Happy”: “My contention is that the oldtime hog impregnated his flesh with the joie de vivre in which he flourished. His mass-bred successors, tended by hirelings, considered only as so much cash in the bank, distill their frustration and so punish us. And now the whole world is in agony. It looks almost as though we had tried to bend God to our own will and that we are being punished. The old-time Missouri hog died with a smile twisting his pink-tipped snout. We have lost our Missouri ham!”

They knew Frank — his baptized name was Francis Peter — in Chicago, in Kansas City, in Cleveland, out on the Pacific Coast, in New York, and on the Main Streets of the Midwestern mining towns. He named his sons for Debs and Edwin Markham for that was one of his ideas about immortality. Few people read more in religious philosophy and he always wrote Jesus as Jeshua which he stoutly maintained was correct. For 30 years his second wife, the former Irene Reynolds, tolerated his idiosyncracies, and when he was mortally ill, helped him in his final project. That was the organization of a cultural exchange between St. Louis and Stuttgart, Germany, now an eminently successful international enterprise. . . . Just at this point the door has opened without a knock, Frank has poked his head inside and there is nothing to do but stop and have a good, long visit with him. There is so much going on that we must swap ideas about! – Irving Dilliard Excerpted from Dilliard’s “Debunker Par Excellence,” FOCUS/Midwest, August 1962. Dilliard, a resident of Collinsville, Ill., was the former editorial page editor of the St. Louis PostDispatch. At the time this story was published he wrote a column for the Chicago American. F/m