An American Hometown: Terre Haute, Indiana, 1927

Foreword

xi Foreword Scott Russell Sanders The earth is a patchwork of places, each with its own natural and human history. In recent decades, however, the qualities that distinguish one place from another have been eroding under the impact of global corporations , electronic communications, and the uniform design of everything from high-rises to highways. In our quest for efficiency, we have been moving toward ever greater homogeneity in how we eat, dress, speak, work, play, travel, communicate, and learn. Nowhere is this homogenization more evident than in the United States, where, from coast to coast, box stores sell the same products, fast food chains peddle the same grub, networks broadcast the same shows. Television flattens regional accents, so that teenagers from Texas sound increasingly like teenagers from Minnesota or Maine. Pushed by advertising, the current fashions in eyeglass frames or phones crop up everywhere at once, like mushrooms after rain. Unless we look beneath the surface, we may be lulled into believing that we dwell, not in particular places, but in a realm of money, merchandise, information, and toys. Tom Roznowski knows better. In this captivating book, he delves beneath the surface of Terre Haute, Indiana, to reveal one city’s rich particularity, and in doing so he illustrates how any of us might gain a deeper sense of our own home places. In 1927, the year Roznowski has chosen to enter the history of Terre Haute, the city billed itself as “The Crossroads of America,” because of its location at the intersection of major east–west and north–south highways and railways. (The state of Indiana later appropriated the slogan for itself.) Working from A to Z through a city directory published that year, he profiles individuals, examines their occupations, surveys businesses and civic institutions , explores neighborhoods, and traces the web of relationships that connected citizens to one another and to their hometown. Roznowski’s cast of characters includes a metaphysician as well as mechanics , a physiognomist as well as physicians, a spiritualist medium as well as ministers. We meet boxers, confectioners, dancers, farmers, miners, welders, waiters, plasterers, bicycle racers, cigar sellers, cake icers, chicken pluckers, stage hands, sign-painters, sausage-makers, innkeepers, locomotive engineers, and practitioners of a host of other trades. A number of those trades reflect the old-fashioned virtue of thrift—a rag collector, a junk dealer, a repairer of barrels, a maker of replacement handles for tools, a seamstress who mended xii Foreword clothes, and a sharpener of saws. Factories and workshops in the city manufactured bottles, brooms, barrels, boxes, bread, and butter; caskets and corsets and coffeepots—along with items starting with every other letter of the alphabet. As a talented singer-songwriter, Roznowski shows a special affection for the many musicians who earned their living by playing at weddings, church socials, house parties, and theaters. And as a connoisseur of regional cuisine, he pays tribute to the cooks who transformed the produce of local farms into hearty meals at cafés, boardinghouses, and hotels. The Parks Purity Pie Company , he assures us, was “the original heaven of pies.” The Bon Ton Pastry Shop continued baking delicacies until the early 1970s, he reports, and there are still quite a few people “whose mouths water at the mere mention of the name.” Throughout the book, he savors the music of names—Rosebud McGrew, Cinderella Smith, Otis Duck, E. Blanche Rippetoe—and he relishes the wry conjunctions of names and professions, such as the two sisters, both teachers, with the surname Failing, or the supervisor of penmanship called Miss Paine, or the watchmaker nicknamed Tick-Tock Tucker, or the janitor named Broome. Woven through these profiles are dozens of stories, each as compact and finely cut as a gem. We read about two mayors, one whose father was an immigrant shoe shiner, and another who started life in the city orphanage. We read about a doctor married to an undertaker, a coupling in which even a failed treatment could be good for business. We learn that Terre Haute produced more World Series ballplayers in that era than any other city. We learn that the owners of clock shops still set their wares to 7:22, the hour of Abraham Lincoln’s death. We discover the origins of civic institutions designed to care for the needy, ranging from the County Poor Farm and Rose Home Orphanage to the Boys Club for Homeless Children and the Home for Aged Women. In the shadows, behind the forthright Rotarians...