Hessville is suspended in time
Guest Commentary by Wayne Machuca

Font Size:

| Sunday, June 30, 2002 | (No comments posted.)

Most people have never heard of Hessville. If Hammond were an "L," Hessville would be a neighborhood in the bottom right portion. But, most people have never heard of Hammond, either. In fact, when most people ask you where you are from, you are most likely to say "Chicago," of which most people do know, or "near Gary, Indiana," which will cause most people to sing a stanza from the old Robert Preston movie "The Music Man."

Hessville, where I grew up, was and continues to be a town suspended in time.

Walk down Kennedy Avenue, and the only way you can tell which decade it is by the cars on the road, which rust out every five years because of the salt spread on the streets each winter. The neighborhoods have narrow, tree-lined streets named after other places or people long forgotten, with houses covered with brick or aluminum siding, or both. The homes are typically white in order to reflect the blast from a nuclear bomb -- or so they say.

My little street was named Parkway because it leads to a small, obscure playground that was called "Lost Park" because it was so difficult to find. Its proper name was "Gibson Park," even though Gibson Street was actually a few blocks away.�Perhaps that is why the park is "Lost."

If there were one word to describe Hessville, that word would be "consistency." In Hessville in the 1960s, everybody worked in the steel mills. Everybody was a Democrat. Everybody went to church. Everybody's grandparents came from someplace else. Everybody's mom stayed home. Everybody was a Cubs fan. Everybody spoke in sentences that had prepositions at the end of, and nobody ever, ever got a divorce. �The world was the mills to the north, U.S. 30 to the south, and the occasional Sunday afternoon trip to Grandma's house in East Chicago for chicken and to sit quietly while the adults spoke Polish.

It was during the summers that we would go to Lost Park and play Indian Ball -- a sort of "baseball without bases" that you play when you can't get enough guys and have to "imagine" base runners -- that I began to notice that many of the homes had peculiar little flags in their windows. Small and rectangular, these red bordered, white flags had a small blue star in the center. Sometimes there would be two blue stars. Sometimes there would be three. �Often, my friends would speak about their older brothers who were off someplace called Vietnam.

As kids, we would often imagine our own gallantry and heroics battling some unknown foe in a place so far away. �We had no idea who the Viet Cong were or why they were so bad. �For us, the images of war were as simple as the old black-and-white war movies we saw on TV. The good guys were good because they were good, and the bad guys were bad because they were bad. �We did not understand the politics or the protests, much less the multisyllabic mysteries of the "military industrial complex." �We did not understand why the college students were so upset. If they, too, were Democrats, then why were they fighting in Chicago?�My father would get angry and say things to the TV like, "It doesn't matter what you think. Those are our boys over there!"

Soon, many of the small blue stars in those small peculiar flags began to change into small golden stars. And that was when my world changed.

One day, my parents took me to my uncle's house to visit with my cousin Tommy.

What was left of him was shipped home from Vietnam to heal. In our family, he was a hero. He was machine-gunned in some forgotten battle by those same dreaded Viet Cong and yet survived. I remember sitting by him as he lay on the sofa, watching TV and laughing. My other cousins were laughing. I was laughing. But it was a different kind of laughter. It was a melancholic laughter with the knowledge that we almost lost Tommy. And for me, it was the realization that there were other Tommys for whom there would be no more laughter.�At that moment, the men and women in Vietnam became real people to me.

NPR asks, "What is my connection with history?" My answer is that whenever I think of home, whenever I think of my childhood, whenever I sing the national anthem at the beginning of a baseball game, I think about the men and women who are sent off who knows where, who knows why, to do who knows what -- and do.�And why do they do this? Is it so I could continue to play Indian Ball in a park called "Lost"? Could it be as simple as that?�Well, probably not. But whether they are in Asia or Eastern Europe or East Africa or Iran or Afghanistan, the fighting men and women are Americans. They are our sons and our daughters. And they are our history.

Wayne Machuca of Visalia, Calif., a 1978 graduate of Hammond's Morton High School, is now teaching at College of the Sequoias in California.

Back to story No comments posted.

Please note: Comments from readers will be screened and may not be posted immediately. If you don't see your comment perhaps:

It wasn't clear, concise or focused on the topic in the story.
It was a personal attack, vulgar, explicit or degrading, used actual or implied profanity or contained potentially libelous statements.
It accused someone of being guilty of a crime.
It promoted violence or illegal acts.
It contained telephone numbers or street addresses, or e-mail addresses and links to Web sites other than nwi.com or government agencies.

In no way do these comments represent the views of The Times or Lee Enterprises.

Passionate views, pointed criticism and critical thinking are welcome. Name-calling, crude and profane language and personal abuse are not welcome.

Reader comments will not be edited - they will be approved or declined. They may be used in the print edition of the newspaper.

If you feel a posted comment has violated these guidelines, please email our New Media team the commenter's name, the comment and a link to the article.

For more information please read our Terms of Service.

Back to story No comments posted.

Post a comment Once your comments are approved, they will appear here.

Marketplace

Sections

Services

Other Publications

Search