More forgotten happenings in Gary...

How could I forget this? -

In the afternoon when I finished up my strip of canvassing, I went looking for my (white) neighbor and the (black) retiree who was doing the same section of town, and as I was walking up the block to them -- I had seen them from afar going house to house as I wandered through the streets -- this middle-aged (black) lady called to me from her porch and was like, "Hey, are you with those people?", and when I said yes, she was like, "Come up here and let me know where you got this registration information."

She then told me that some woman from out of Chicago has been using her address for years so she buys collectible dolls mail-order and has the dolls shipped to Chicago but the bills shipped to Gary, and she's been on the prosecutor for years about this with mail-fraud, but now if it turns out that the woman actually tried to register at her house, that that's a federal crime and maybe a federal prosecutor would pick up the case and throw her in jail.

"Dang," I was like, "you sound like you're out of Law and Order, 'it's time to take this to the feds,'" I was like, and then for good measure I added, "BUM BUM," before being like, "How do you know all this, are a you a lawyer or something?", and then she told me that she works on the riverboat casinos and used to be the union head, so she knows a bit about law and stuff like that.

Like a minute later, my neighbor and the retiree we were canvassing with walked up, and she kind of explained the whole thing to them again, and then as we walked away she started muttering that that other woman had never even lived there, but had just decided to stick her with all the doll bills years ago after her son had broken up with her.