To break up my 11-hour day I went for a run. And just after we started jogging, The Yankee and I, we went by a window and saw snow flakes. And so being indoors was a good idea. Because I could look like this:
But we ran in this gym instead:
That’s Wildermuth, an intramural facility, where I ran eight miles tonight. From 1928 until 1960 it was the home of the basketball team. And, on this day in 1946, it looked like this:
I’m glad I never had to stand in line to register for a college class. I think my freshman year my alma mater was on their second year of phone registration. At an orientation session they plopped in a VHS tape and made us watch a corny — even by the standards of the day — video about how to sign up for classes. But that system only lasted a few more years. Before I graduated they were doing it all online.
Not in line, online. And that probably changed things, too.
Anyway, a few more views on my snowy walk back from Wildermuth to Franklin Hall, where a sports show was recorded tonight:
You reach a certain point with these sort of pictures where you think “Hey, more snow. Yeah, yeah.” And that is almost always just behind “I can’t feel my hands.”
And as an aside about nothing, we had gumbo for dinner tonight. So I washed the dishes while listening
A Louisiana boy singing Delta and soul blues while snow was on the ground outside.
It makes perfect sense while you’re standing at the kitchen sink.
After I parked this morning I walked by this tree on the way into the office this morning:
At lunch time, I saw this tree:
Different trees, of course. Different species, even. But they’re just a block away. That was pretty much the day, outside.
The sun was shining, probably for about 15 minutes altogether, this morning on my way into the office. At least I had those bright, pretty skies for the brief time I could spend outside this morning. It was gray later. I didn’t look for other tree fruits on my way out. We’d progressed to a full on misting event as day turned into evening. It rained tonight, so we ran the gamut.
Gamut is an old English word, stemming from medieval Latin. It originally had to do with a musical note, but turned into an expression that discusses the entire musical scale.
On my way to the car I was also thinking about this song:
That’s a cover on an album of covers that won a grammy for folk album of the year in the early 1990s. The song was written by Janis Ian. Janis Ian is still playing, some 50 years into her career. And she seems like a pretty hilarious grandmother on Twitter, too. She had 34 dates in 2015 and has four booked for this summer, according to her website. And, look, here they are, Ian and Griffith together, in 1993:
Anyway, that song, for 20-some years, has seemed to me like every flatland piece of America in the 20th century.
Here’s something from the 19th century, December 11, 1889 in The New York Times:
That was the “then,” portion of the story. Which brings us to the turn of the century, William McKinley’s America:
“Thus a heterogeneous mass of people poured into this part of the Northwest Territory, good and bad being pretty evenly mixed. The Southerners were sound material, yet the bad among them were very bad indeed.”
Let’s discuss them!
“Today their descendants — many of them, at least — are the typical Hoosiers that one hears of in the newspapers. They carefully elude the refining touch of education and even as far as possible the census taker.”
If they’d just talk to the poor downtrodden census taker, we mean, he’s just some geek we found in Ohio, then everything else would be better off for those people in Indiana. Poor buggers.
“Down in some of the State’s southern counties they are at their worst.”
Ain’t that always the way, dear reader?
“In Brown County, an almost impenetrable section of hills, they are in their glory.”
Less than one percent of the state lives there today. But the county only reports a poverty rate of 11.4 percent, with 22 percent having at least one college degree. The arts and being outdoors getaway destination are the chief industries there these days.
“They would be as much at home in the mountains of Tennessee and Alabama as in the Hoosier hill ranges.”
Come again?
“They are indifferent farmers, and have no interest in the world beyond the hog quotations in the St. Louis or Cincinnati market.”
I could go plow that field, but whatever. ‘Didja you hear ’bout what Mertle’s sow said in Missourah ‘other day?
“But, as if to mark the difference, the adjoining county of Bartholomew contains a different people.”
Now, Bartholomew is about the same size, and a full 28 percent of them have college degrees and there’s an 11.9 percent poverty rate. Cummins Diesel is based there. Chuck Taylor, the sneaker guy, was from there, just like Vice President Mike Pence and NASCAR champ Tony Stewart. A popular cartoonist, a software CEO and the former president of thee National Association of Professional Baseball Leagues all call Bartholomew County home. In the 1900 census, taken in the months just after this article, Bartholomew was the mean population center of the U.S. Except that was probably incorrect because of those lyin’, census avoidin’ Hoosiers.
“They, too, are among the Southerners who came to Indiana, but they have kept pace with time’s advance, and are thrifty farmers or active tradespeople.”
Not at all like their slovenly cousins in Brown County.
“Similar contrasts might be pointed out in other sections.”
You go elsewhere the differences are the same. We suppose. We can’t be sure, so we’re speaking in generalities. Not like we have the Internet, yet.
“Even in going south from Indianapolis for a ride of an hour on the railroad one encounters the original Hoosier in his worst aspect.”
You get out of the city, God be with you. We’ve seen it. Have you ever been to Pennsylvania?
Hard to imagine exactly who The Times liked back then. Odd that so many people still think they have such a narrow view of things.
I got in at about 10 p.m. last night, just in time for frozen pizza and then bed. Woke up a half hour earlier than usual this morning. I grabbed a bit of breakfast on the way into the office and, when I got there, I loaded up a cart worth of stuff to send to the surplus store.
If you need a handful of old standard definition television cameras or other outdated gear, I know where you can get it.
After that, the morning show:
The two ladies on the right are national champion cheerleaders. They told me it gets harder every year. They’d know. One has two championships, the other has three. Their team has won five of the last six titles. Harder every year. But, for one, her cheer career is almost over. She wants to work in that business, perhaps as a coach. The other is planning to go to medical school.
So this was the second episode of the new morning show. It looks promising and you’ll see it here when they upload it.
I pretty much lived in the studio today. After the morning show there was anchor training and then some other folks came in and used the room for some interviews. We did critiques of the news shows and then I went back to the studio for more of those interviews and a series of pesky emails and so on.
When the day was over I headed to the grocery store. On the way I found a local country station, a 3,800 watt shop with a liner that says “Fox News is coming up next, after this country classic!”
And then Elvis played. “Devil in Disguise.” Even in 1963, with his powers not yet fading, saw that song go top ten on both the Billboard Hot 100 and the R&B charts. That was no country song. Neither was Jerry Lee Lewis’ cover of “Me and Bobby McGee,” but it showed up a few songs later. There was also Linda Ronstadt and Buck Owens and Merle Haggard and there was nothing wrong with any of that. But Elvis? Or, that Elvis?
He had 54 hits on the country charts, including 11 number ones. Altogether, he stayed on the country chart for almost 12 years. Surprisingly, there’s a lot of contradiction on the individual song data online, but this was Elvis’ most successful country song:
Thirty-nine weeks on the country charts. It was written by Stan Kesler and Charlie Feathers wrote it, two more Mississippi boys. It was covered by everyone so it is basically a standard. Should have heard that on the radio.
Oh, which reminds me, I met Elvis once:
Barbecue restaurant, out in the pine tree woods of Georgia, like you do.
Working at IU, I have a free subscription to the New York Times and other publications. I could read all of the time and not read it all. And that’s just in today’s world. I also have access to the Times Machine which is more than a century and a half of old news, and a reasonably decent search engine.
So I searched. And one of the first things I found was the supposed origin of the word hoosier.
This is one of the stories that gets around. Truth is, no one really knows where the word comes from. There are some scholars still working on trying to figure it out.
Everyone is trying to figure something out, though, I suppose.
We were figuring out a sports show tonight:
And I watched this documentary on the history of music in Memphis. And if you like music, the history of music, or the South, or just watching joyous people do things they enjoy …
That is a film worth your time.
music / photo / site / Thursday / video — Comments Off on This was an unintentional mid-20th century post 22 Dec 16
