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Just a Hoosier farm boy: Reflections on Indiana

Part One: Hoosier

It brings me great pride to be a Hoosier, to hail from the solid center of the country. From my home it’s a thousand miles to New York City and a thousand miles to Denver. From Denver it’s another thousand miles to Los Angeles. Out here in flyover country there’s space to breathe and room to stretch your legs. I have lived in and traveled to many places, but I always thought life was best lived in Indiana.

There are several features that are quintessentially Hoosier State to me. I offer some reflections below.

Indiana landscapes The state naturally divides itself into areas or regions. The northern third of the state was swampy until the beginning of the 20^th century when drainage ditches crisscrossed it to make it tillable. The central third of the state, where I come from, boasts rolling hills and farms with loamy soil and lazy creeks. The southern third is hilly and wooded with farms and old farmhouses scattered all the way to the Ohio River, or ‘the river’ as it’s known here.

If you live in Fort Wayne or Hammond or Indianapolis there is little ever heard from Evansville or Washington or Scottsburg. People in Aurora and Loogootee and Vincennes know little of Lafayette or Goshen or Logansport. Media markets are dispersed in Fort Wayne, Chicago, Indianapolis, Dayton, Cincinnati, Louisville, Evansville, and Terre Haute. Living sixty miles from Indianapolis means that a very radio stations come in clearly from our state capital. Few come in clearly from other cities, either, for that matter. I like that.

Not so long ago there was WOWO, a 50,000 watt station from Fort Wayne which served as a unifying voice for people all across the Midwest. Toward noon every weekday, one could tune into Dinner on the Farm to hear all the latest grain and livestock prices, with commentary and music for farm folk. That voice has dimmed now.

Indianapolis doesn’t dominate the state, even politically. In odd-numbered years when state representatives and state senators migrate to Indianapolis at the same time in January, the long session of the legislature lasts only 61 days and must end by April 30. It’s plenty of time for political mischief and representative democracy. After that they have to go home and make a living like everyone else. We get by somehow. I like that.

Because I grew up here, no place else in the world looks quite right. Henry County, Wayne County, Hancock County, and Rush County are the best examples of a comforting layout of homes, farms, timber, creeks, and roads. The land is rich and productive. Our climax forest is beech-maple so we have beautiful woods in all four seasons. Western Ohio leaves me restless. North of US 36 it’s too spread out. West of Indianapolis all along US 41 nothing is where I expect it to be. The southern part of the state is old-timey and more like the Upper South, which isn’t all bad, but it’s just not as perfect as the stretch along the great National Road from the Ohio line to Greenfield, from Muncie to Rushville, at least not for me.

When I encounter people who say they drove across Ohio and Indiana, Illinois and Iowa and saw nothing but corn, I chuckle to myself figuring they must have been blind or asleep. The rich landscape of the Midwest is never boring.

Small towns There are small towns scattered all across the state. Those towns are there because of geography and settlement patterns. Some were early gristmill and sawmill towns. Some sprang up at a convenient place to stop for the night. Most of them offered hope of wealth and growth to their founders. Ninety-two of them became today’s county seats. Unlike in New England, where the congregational church and a common defined the center of town, Midwestern county seat towns formed around a court house, that is, the rule of law and the sanctity of property. Every county court house in Indiana is unique, and nearly every one is beautiful. Today they are built of Indiana limestone, brick, marble, and granite. The early wooden ones are long gone.

Many small towns fell on hard times in the 1960s when the interstate highway system and highway bypasses appeared. Chain stores and service stations fled high taxes by building new venues on the edge of towns. Today many of these have begun to fight to bring life back into the old town centers. Downtown areas usually featured relatively taller commercial buildings, lodge halls, grocery stores, law offices, restaurants and bars. In the county seat towns, the law and abstract offices are still there, along with county and city government offices. Names and dates of construction for downtown buildings decorate the building fronts. Look up when you go downtown. There’s a lot to learn there.

Andrew Carnegie, the great industrialist, used his fortune to see to it that every burg of any size had a solid local library in the early years of the 20^th century. Building on that tradition, local libraries occupy a vital niche in most communities. It is there one can find much of the history of any town in the county. Whether the town has fallen on hard times or not, our local libraries are there keeping the memories alive. The library of my childhood and youth was the old Morrison-Reeves Library in Richmond. It was not a Carnegie library because it had been built before Carnegie's time, in the 1860s, and remodeled into its Richardsonian Romanesque glory in 1893. It anchored the corner of North 6^th and A streets until its (ill-advised, in my view) replacement in the 1980s.

I discovered history and literature within its walls. The new library is more practical, I’m sure, but everyone who knew the old library misses it. Character matters, especially in old buildings, and Morrison-Reeves Library had plenty to spare.

Indiana’s small towns contain a treasure trove of every building style from the 1810s to the present day. Because of development in the 19^th Century and the early 20^th Century, our small towns are collections of architectural expression of the greatest period of American history. Because they boasted construction with high quality, durable materials, most of them remain. From log cabin to Federal, Italianate to Second Empire, Sanitary to Postwar and Atomic Ranch, practically every little burg offers a feast to the eye. They never cease to astonish and entertain me when I’m there.

East side of the Henry County Court House, the same court house featured in Ross Lockridge, Jr.'s Raintree County. This is in New Castle.

The Race

Practically everyone knows of the Indianapolis 500, the great automobile race held each Memorial Day weekend in Speedway, Indiana, on the west side of Indianapolis. To native Hoosiers, it’s simply known as “The Race.” There is Hoosier pride there, also. Growing up along the National Road, US 40, in the 1950s and 1960s, before the interstate highway system came along, we were aware of the tension and excitement that approaching race day brought each year. Between the Ohio state line and Indianapolis, the little towns along the great National Road built their annual schedules around race day. Many times have I ridden along the National Road around Memorial Day noticing the signs and preparation for the race. Because so many people drove along the National Road to go to the race, motels and restaurants and small towns went all out to convince travelers to stop for a while. There were major events like fish frys and community dinners to accommodate the fans who attended the race.

I’ve never been to the race because it was always too costly for my family, but when I reached 16 I had an old car, and I began to go to the Indianapolis 500 Time Trials, held on the weekends before the race each year. When I went to the Time Trials in the 1970s, a ticket was $7, which was plenty expensive, considering that I was working for the minimum wage of $1.60 per hour. I always told myself that time trials were more fun than the race because I was able to see the drivers and hear the cars without being in the middle of a crowd of 300,000 people. As a Hoosier Farm Boy, there is nothing comfortable about being in a crowd that large. Going to Time Trials fixed in my mind all the sights and sounds of the race. Hearing a single race car pass overhead as I entered the infield by walking underneath the track’s surface was simply unforgettable. There are no mufflers at the race. Time Trials is a series of qualifying laps run by individual drivers. There may be more than one car on the track at a time, but the others must stay out of the way as each car and driver attempts to qualify for the actual race. Only the fastest 33 cars and their drivers start the race.

There is no better way to experience the race, in my view, than by hearing it on the radio. All across Indiana on that day, families tuned in as they prepared for a Memorial Day cookout or dinner with family. In fishing boats, pickup trucks, at campgrounds and over picnic tables, fans like me tuned in to hear the dramatic buildup to the start of The Greatest Spectacle in Racing. Then came the Purdue marching band, a familiar voice singing “Back Home Again in Indiana,” and the voice of Tony Hulman calling out “Gentlemen, start your engines!” followed by their roar and the answering roar of the crowd. Then there was the parade lap, the pace lap, and when the pace car pulled into the pits, the sound of 33 race cars flashing across the starting line to plunge into the first turn. The radio voices passed the listeners from the first two turns into the back straightaway, and then into the third and fourth turns, followed by the main voice calling the end of the first lap. To this day it makes chills run down my back, and I don’t consider myself a race fan at all.

With only a few wartime exceptions, the race had been run every year since 1911, and the well-known Borg-Warner trophy immortalized the likenesses of the winners in miniature. I think most Hoosiers had their favorites. To me, the race was a kind of morality play for the public. One had to be smart and dedicated to have a chance of even being in the race. Preparation went on throughout the year for this one event, and we followed our favorites. I even had a family connection to the race. In the late 1960s my dad took a job at the Meadows Motel on North 38^th Street in Indianapolis. Some famous drivers stayed there every year, among them Parnelli Jones. Jones won the race in 1963 and was a perennial favorite. That first name seemed to me to naturally belong to someone used to moving around in a hurry. Parnelli Jones. He must be the fastest man alive. My dad told some stories and had nice things to say about him and his crew.

Other favorites came along, too, but the other side of the race was the drivers we didn’t like. This became part of the morality tale. It wasn’t always the nice guys or the gentlemen who won. Sometimes the winner was arrogant and pushy and uncharitable. I won’t mention one driver in particular, except to say that he won the race four times, each of them a dark day for me.

The race was always extremely dangerous. At the height of my interest, drivers might exceed 200 MPH on the back straightaway between turns two and three, but the worst danger was from fire during a crash or in the pits. Indy cars burn ethanol, not gasoline. Gasoline makes visible flame and smoke when it burns, but ethanol can burn with an invisible flame and no smoke. Sometimes only the wavy lines of heat rising from a crash tell the tale. When tires burn there is smoke, but that takes time. The rescue crews and crash trucks remain vital to protecting the lives of the drivers should the worst happen.

There have been many great races, but my favorite was the photo finish in the 1992 race. Hearing Paul Page call the two drivers flying full speed toward the strip of brick at the Speedway finish line was unforgettable. It all played in our imaginations when we heard it on the radio. We all knew the flag code by heart. Green started the race, yellow meant that everyone had to slow down, proceed with caution and hold the position, the white flag meant there was one lap remaining, and the checkered flag, waved in classic winner sequence with the crowd, the roar, the pylon, and the Speedway as backdrop was an emotional experience. Indianapolis is where America learned what a checkered flag meant.

Hoosier pride Indiana takes great pride in its colleges and universities. Indiana University, my alma mater (A.B. with honors 1975), has long been a powerhouse in many areas. The doors to its history department opened like the entrance to Aladdin’s cave when I arrived in the fall of 1971. I double-majored in American and Modern European history, and every professor at whose feet I sat was a world-class scholar. They all taught their own classes and graded their own exams. They were tough, but every one of them loved what they did, and it showed. I worked closely with the very best: Leonard Lundin, Charles Jelavich, Walter Nugent, Bradford Martin. In those days the survey courses did not count toward the major, so I began with a full year of Islamic Civilization. At the beginning of sophomore year, my name was on the list of students in Charles Jelavich’s history proseminar. There was a training ground I’ll never forget. We critiqued each others’ papers with a requirement that we check every quote and find every flaw. When we got done with each other, then Dr. Jelavich handed back the copy he had marked up. It was brutal. We improved fast. Dr. Jelavich lectured on 19^th Century Europe, the Great War, and World War II. He had been a translator of Russian at Allied Headquarters in Berlin at the end of the war. He met Eisenhower and Montgomery and Zhukov. In his lectures he put us on the scene as Imperial Germany, Imperial Austria, and Imperial Russia moved into the 20^th Century and descended into the Great War. It was the experience of a lifetime for me, and that was my second major!

Although I was a history major from day one at IU, by the time my junior year came round, my interest had turned into a passion. That year I took Dr. Nugent’s seminar. OMG!! He was amazing. Every time he spoke as we sat around a big table, new worlds of historical insight opened in front of me. His specialty was the Gilded Age, and he was a leading light in the New Social History, history best understood from the bottom up. It was all about ordinary people, their attitudes, their culture, the opening of the frontier, and the settlement of the West. He seemed to know every book ever written as well as their authors. He was absolutely brilliant, but always pleasant and likeable. As with Jelavich, I sat at his feet in awe. He was a terror when he critiqued a paper, but we understood that we had it easier than he did when he was a grad student at the University of Chicago. When he was there, it was Kate Turabian herself who critiqued the dissertations. I’m happy to have missed that ordeal. He transferred his enthusiasm to us all, and I came to love economic history, the Civil War, the Homestead Act, the frontier and Frederick Jackson Turner, Gilded Age politics, the Columbian Exposition, and the years before the Great War.

There were so many famous historians that we had to limit ourselves to just a few. They were heady days, and I loved every minute of my four years there. It was the first time I can recall being aware of living in a golden era while I was still in it.

One memory I treasure was frequently seeing Herman Wells on campus. He had retired by that time, but he remained a campus legend. Everybody knew who he was, and I said hello to him once, but he was usually in the Indiana Memorial Union with a crowd around him. Like Father Hesburgh at Notre Dame, when people came into his presence, they usually decided that donating money to IU was something they ought to do. He was always kindly when I saw him, and wore his fame with an easy grace.

There is additional Hoosier pride in our agricultural and engineering school, Purdue University. Both my brothers went to Purdue as undergrads, so there is some lingering resentment each year after the Old Oaken Bucket rivalry gridiron match between Purdue and Indiana. Sometimes they want to mention it, sometimes I do, but we usually say nothing. It’s better to eat more instead. When one considers that Neil Armstrong was a Boilermaker, then even we IU alumni can admit that Purdue might be okay after all. I said might!

Of course, great national pride rests around the shrines at South Bend, Indiana, home of the Fighting Irish. Notre Dame is my second alma mater, having taken my masters and doctoral degrees there. There are two distinct worlds at Notre Dame. For 12,000 undergrads who all think they have died and gone to heaven early, it is a dream come true. There is at least one story about football in the student paper every day of the school year. For those who serve as graduate students, it’s a very different world. Let’s put it this way. I was in the Notre Dame stadium once. It was a Thursday, I think, and when I walked past it to my beloved Dodge Omni, the big gate on the north end stood open. “What the heck,” I thought to myself. I walked through the iron gates to the edge of the seating where I could see around inside, then walked back out and drove away. So I’ve been in the house the Rockne built. It’s nothing personal. When I was at IU, someone gave me a basketball ticket to IU vs. Ball State. I went. The only other time I was in Assembly Hall was to graduate. I’m not a big sports guy.

My six Notre Dame years came at the end of the Father Hesburgh era. He might be seen on campus occasionally, and I rode the elevator with him on a few occasions. He spoke sometimes, but he always was the center of his own universe at Notre Dame. He retired when I was there, and moved out of his office in the Dome, taking over most of the 12^th floor of the Hesburgh Library. My carrel was on the 10^th floor, but the grad students who had to find other quarters were not happy. Hesburgh took the side of the 12^th floor that looked out across the heart of campus toward the Dome. Nobody objected openly.

My graduate student experience there was often challenging. There were factions in my department, and some people weren’t happy that I was there. It’s a long story. Grad students are the lowest of the low in terms of status on campus. Others control a grad student’s present and future. There is enormous work with no expectation of either success or reward afterward. Until the day they actually hand a degree to you (after paying a final, insulting, $45 for it, you’re nothing but ABD). But I had strong allies. Dr. Nugent had moved there from IU just before I decided to go back to grad school. He was powerful, respected, and wise, and he was the best mentor a grad student ever had. When I graduated with my Ph.D, he was the only department faculty member who attended. He placed my hood over my head to crown one of the proudest moments of my life. He will always be my academic hero.

I met two great friends with great minds there. Dr. Brad Birzer, now professor of history at Hillsdale College, and Dr. Kevin Smant, now professor of history at the University of Texas, were friends and colleagues with whom I shared the ups and downs of student life. We ate ramen noodles in the snack bar called The Pit, lived most of every day of the week in the library, and counseled each other as needed. We were all trying to sort out our lives and careers, so we shared battles and the victories and losses. They are forever true friends.

There are many other fine schools in Indiana, and we’re  proud of all of them. Ball State University in Muncie, and Indiana State University in Terre Haute still produce many of our finest teachers. Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, also in Terre Haute, takes second place to no one in the technology field. A long list of private schools might be headed by Hanover, Depauw, Taylor, and Butler. Settlers moving west from New York and Pennsylvania brought their fervor for education to the Hoosier state, planting many institutions of higher learning here and across the entire Midwest. We are all the better for it.