By Scott Sullivan
Editor
Hot Smoke/The Pearl
Sophomore year at Purdue, student government friends named me Shreve Hall Cultural Director. Our culture: create a new unpaid job whose task was be interesting.
We devised Americans for a Sensible Society to invite U.S. Rep. Earl Landgrebe, one of New Times’ newly-named Ten Dumbest Congressmen, to campus.
Landgrebe, whose Valparaiso trucking firm launched his political ambitions, was going through a rough patch. Among four of 435 Congressmen voting against President Nixon’s post-Watergate tape “smoking gun” impeachment, he explained, “Don’t confuse me with facts. I’ve got a closed mind. I’m going to stick with my president even if he and I have to be taken out of this building and shot.”
Nixon resigned 3 days later. Once school started, we invited our Rep. to a rally with the come-on “Be an ASS. Vote for Earl.”
It didn’t happen, which may have been why Landgrebe was smashed in the November 1974 election by Democrat Floyd Fithian, first time in 32 years Indiana’s District 2 had not gone Republican. By then even my GOP Dad had grown embarrassed.
Mom, a debater, saw things differently. “Want to win?” she asked.
“That’s rhetorical, right?”
“What isn’t? Think like the other side does.” She was like Bobby Fischer or Sun Tzu that way.
Occupying other minds added to my fluency pulling grades but made it hard to return to mine. This would take learning art, nature, science and life are not separate studies. Economics was easier; scarcity was embedded.
Sex came via a doctor’s daughter buxom, bespectacled, blonde who took Bio notes for me while I slept off all-night bridge games. Curious as I was, she watched me play I-M basketball. “Don’t hurt me,” she said. For months I belabored how that came out.
Looking through new mental lenses ala Rimbaud seemed a safer path through illusions. Postwar writers I was reading — Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Eliot, begetting Bob Dylan, Alan Ginsberg — set me off on Sartre, Camus and Beckett.
Time to study Ancient Greece. On my first test I got a B. “What?” I asked my prof. “You’ll get worse if you don’t better,” he told me. Thanks.
I’d tested out of English and Math requirements thanks to music. Words, numbers, notes and rhythms — how did they combine and to what effect? I grew bored of the Bachman-Turner Overdrive my friends partied to and went exploring.
Taking the D.J. name “Kapt. Kopter” from Spirit guitarist Randy California’s 1972 album with the (Fabulous) Twirly Birds, I retired to the Shreve basement to spin favorites from “Wonderful WRFL” archives between shows by Bob “Bubbles” Bates — who followed “VD Is For Everyone” spots with The Guess Who’s “Clap for the Wolfman” — and the Buffalo Joy Hour.
For the All-Campus Network I pared my playlist, mixing and matching Pink Floyd’s “One of These Days” bleeding into Robin Trower’s “Bridge of Sighs,” King Crimson, Nilsson and Frank Zappa, which got “Kapt. Kopter” banned as planned.
My summer job was painting Shreve dorm room walls pale yellow paired with T-Man while listening to Top 40 drek (Captain and Tenille, good Lord) from paint-splattered radios. We lunched in the basement with other workers watching the soap opera satire “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman” and W.C. Fields movies.
Student pairs were assigned a room a day, which T-Man and I finished mid-morning and snuck off to seek a “Pink Panther” the radio was promoting. Find him, win advertiser junk neither of us wanted except to show fellow workers when we got back.
My bete noire, called Sherwin Williams for his cap, was a gospel savant who said he’d memorized 40 years of Top 40 charts.
“Hot Smoke and Sassafras” I tested him.
“Bubble Puppy, peaked at No. 14 on U.S, Billboard 2-8-69 said Sherwin. He tried to convert me while I tried to disconcert him.
“You know where they ranked when but nothing about what they are,” I said.
“They are songs.”
“All literal, no metaphor. What for?”
“Eternal Life.”
“Ever find the Panther?”
“Who cares?”
“No one. Thanks,” I said.
Years later I came to appreciate Landgrebe, who’d fought the state forming a Civil Rights Commission saying, “If we need a 12-man commission to protect rights of Negroes who represent maybe 12 percent of our population, why not have a much bigger group to see that the Negroes don’t discriminate against us?” No women either?
He had faith, was stalwart. On June 29, 1986, I returned from walking black and white cats Miao and Oaim through woods down a two-track from my rental shack in Muskegon, where I was editing my first newspaper, to Lake Michigan. I sat on a wood jetty, sun setting west and Last-Quarter moon rising east, after hearing President Reagan had made quiet contact with South Africa’s outlawed African National Congress, and Earl Landgrebe, who I still called “The Pearl,” died.