IN Writing , livre ebook

IN Writing will be enjoyable to the general reader for its obscure or previously suppressed stories using a well-researched behind-the-scenes point of view, as well as essays about more renowned people and issues that make up the fabric of our state s image. This is a celebration of Indiana, a state that, in my opinion, has suffered in the past from its collective inferiority complex.
RACHEL BERENSEN PERRY , author of William J. Forsyth: The Life and Work of an Indiana Artist
Douglas Wissing s collection IN Writing is a revelation, an appealing insider s look at the often overlooked and unexpected history of a great swath of Indiana, its people, history, and lore. Though it begins and ends in Indiana, the reader will see how the rest of the world appears through the prism of the Hoosier state. Indiana is both a lens and a heart in Wissing s capable rendering.
WILLIAM O ROURKE , author of Confessions of a Guilty Freelancer
A Hoosier through and through, I love the way Doug Wissing reveals the quirks and marvels of our state and its people. I can t wait to give it to my Flyover friends with the inscription I told you. We re way more interesting than you think.
BARBARA SHOUP , author of An American Tune: A Novel

UNCOVERING
the
UNEXPECTED
HOOSIER
STATE

DOUGLAS A. WISSING
This book is a publication of
QUARRY BOOKS
an imprint of
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
and a co-publication with
INDIANA HISTORICAL SOCIETY PRESS
Eugene and Marilyn Glick
Indiana History Center
450 West Ohio Street
Indianapolis, Indiana 46202-3269 USA
indianahistory.org
2016 by Douglas A. Wissing
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z 39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wissing, Douglas A., author.
IN writing : uncovering the unexpected Hoosier State / Douglas A. Wissing.
pages cm
Includes index.
ISBN 978-0-253-01904-2 (pbk. : alk. paper) - ISBN 978-0-253-01910-3 (ebook) 1. Indiana-Description and travel. 2. Indiana-Biography. 3. Indiana-History. I. Title. II. Title: Indiana writing.
F 526.W78 2015
977.2-dc23
2015033430
1 2 3 4 5 21 20 19 18 17 16
When we speak of place we often speak of our sense of it, its constant though peripheral presence. That is, there no such thing as a place, only our inscription of it we carry around in our own nervous systems.
MICHAEL MARTONE
CONTENTS
Introduction
PART 1 SAINTS AND SINNERS
1 The Last Vaudevillian: Red Skelton
2 Hubris: Bobby Knight
3 Odd Bodkin
4 D.C. Riddle
5 The Hoosier General: Lewis B. Hershey and the Selective Service
6 Herbie Wirth
7 Inner Vision: Amish Healer
PART 2 COMPLICATED PLACES
8 A Fair of the Heart
9 A Surprising Utopia
10 Architecture and Community
11 The Song of Indiana
PART 3 CULINARY DELIGHTS
12 Cook Good, Serve Generously, Price Modestly : The Shapiro s Story
13 She s the Cheese
14 Strange Brew
15 Market Daze: Bloomington s Farmers Market
16 Pawpaw Redux
17 Tibetan New Year Celebration
18 Lair of the Turtle Soup: A Culinary Tradition
PART 4 ARTISTS AND THEIR CRAFT
19 This Rash Adventure: Ezra Pound at Wabash College
20 Erotica Whose Purpose Was Scholarly: Kinsey Institute Art Exhibit
21 Gargoyles and Other Curious Creatures
22 Crossroads of American Sculpture
23 The Stuff of Legend: Indiana and the Empire State Building
PART 5 THE PRESENT PAST
24 John Dillinger s Funeral
25 Twist the Tiger s Tail
26 That s It: Prohibition, 1918-1933
27 Black-Gold Era s Luxurious Perch: Evansville Petroleum Club
28 Lions, Tigers, High Wires
29 Conflict and Conciliation
30 Jihadis in Indiana
31 War Fare
Credits
Index

INTRODUCTION
THIS IS A BOOK ABOUT INDIANA IN ALL ITS GLORIOUS complexity: the sacred and profane; naughty and nice; saints and sinners; war and peace; small towns and big cities; art, architecture, poetry, and victuals. I ve been around the world a few times, and contributed to big-city media like the New York Times, Washington Post, BBC and CNN , but I always tell people I m as Hoosier as you get: a small-town boy descended from Quebecois fur-traders who paddled down to Vincennes in the 1700s and an Alsatian French Foreign Legionnaire who established a brewery there in the 1850s. So I am rooted in Indiana pure and simple. And no matter what I write, I always seem to swing back to the Hoosier state to explore the depths of who we are and what we do.
This is a book about the connections-sometimes unexpected-that bind us Hoosiers to the world. I ve been learning that story since I was a kid standing by the Wabash River with my beloved grandfather Clarence Stout, Sr., who proudly celebrated our Hoosier-Creole heritage. He pointed upstream and explained our people came from up north in Canada. And then he pointed south and talked about how the wild boys of his youth used to paddle down to New Orleans to see what a real Creole city looked like. Connections. I ve been seeing them since. Hoosiers contributing their talents and genius to the larger world: a famous Indiana-born explorer who introduced Tibet to America early in the twentieth century; courageous Indiana farmer-soldiers ardently trying to win the hearts and minds of twenty-first-century Afghan insurgents; Hoosier artisans work pulsing with the aesthetics of far-away homelands; a famous modernist poet who had to leave to make his mark. Places that speak to the wider world: Columbus and its remarkable architecture; New Harmony and its enduring idealism; Indianapolis s gargoyles and its renowned Crown Hill cemetery. Then there s our celebrated Hoosier fare, offering quirky diversity to the world.
The essays in this book were selected from the million or so words I ve written on Indiana in the course of producing hundreds of articles and a half-dozen books over the last twenty years. Excepting a new essay, Jihadis in Indiana, all of the articles originally appeared in publications that include the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Indianapolis Star, Nuvo, Cond Nast Details, Traces, Indianapolis Monthly , and the long-lost and lamented artsindiana . There are a few excerpts from my books.
The collection is not inclusive; it s not even representative. But hopefully these thirty-one chapters reflect some of Indiana s unexpected ways, and help us appreciate our remarkable state even more. So here it is, IN Writing: Uncovering the Unexpected Hoosier State .
Douglas A. Wissing
Bloomington, Indiana
Part 1
Saints and Sinners


Indiana-born entertainer Red Skelton left Vincennes in 1925 to join Doc Lewis s Patent Medicine Show. From there he entertained people in tent shows, showboats, circuses, dance marathons, vaudeville, radio, movies, and television.
Courtesy of Indiana Historical Society, General Picture Collection, M 411 .
1
THE LAST VAUDEVILLIAN
RED SKELTON
IT WAS A BIG DEAL WHEN RED SKELTON CAME TO VISIT MY grandfather, Clarence Stout Sr., when I was a kid in Vincennes. There was not much going on down there in the mid-1950s, and Red was definitely the town celebrity. Red would show up in a vast car and disappear behind the pocket doors of my grandfather s wainscoted office that was hung with hundreds of autographed publicity photos of show-business greats and not-so-greats from the 1920s to the 1940s.
Besides being a composer and impresario, my grandfather managed the old Vincennes vaudeville theater, the Pantheon, when Red was a penniless, rubber-faced kid with a penchant for falling off stages for laughs. He told him, Get out of Vincennes, Red, you ve got too much talent, he later recounted as he puffed on his pipe.
Skelton took my grandfather s advice, and when Red died on September 17, 1997, at eighty-four years old, America and Indiana lost a clown, and a link to our development as a people. Skelton s career spanned a broad swath of entertainment history, from medicine shows to coast-to-coast broadcasts, from a traditional rural society to a fast-paced urban one.
It is a long way from the physical clowning of a medicine show to the arid cynicism of a Dennis Miller dialogue. Yet in his career, Skelton saw it all-moving from medicine shows to tent shows to showboats to burlesque halls to dance marathons to vaudeville stages to nightclubs to radio, movies, and, ultimately, twenty years of prime-time television.
He was born in Vincennes on July 18, 1913, hitting his cue for the first time, arriving before his brothers got home from school, as his mother hoped. He grew up in poverty that marked him for life, his family so poor they didn t have a pot to pee in, or a window to throw it out of, as a childhood friend recalled. Red had already run away from Vincennes once by the time my grandfather counseled it. Red left town with Doc Lewi