33. Ben–Hur ... THE FARM EAST OF PINE VILLAGE

Robert had been selected as a delegate to the 1971 Rural Electric Membership Corporation Youth Tour of Washington, D.C. The bus taking the Indiana delegation first to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, was to leave Indianapolis at 2:00 in the morning, so as to arrive at the battlefield by 8:00. The evening before departure, Robert saw the 1959 movie Ben–Hur at the Devon Theater in Attica. He had never seen it before. Joe and Ida reluctantly turned down the opportunity to accompany Robert, as they felt they were too busy just then, so Robert drove himself to the theater.

Many years earlier, Joe and Ida had taken Charles and Robert to see Lew Wallace’s study in nearby Crawfordsville. Lew was the author of Ben–Hur: A Tale of the Christ, which was published on the 12th of November in 1880. Lewis was born in 1827 in Brookville. Lew’s father, David, a lawyer, moved his family to Covington. Lew’s mother, Esther French Test, died in 1834. In 1836, David married Zerelda Gray Sanders. By 1837, David had been elected Governor of Indiana, and he moved his family to Indianapolis. When Lew was thirteen, he was enrolled in a private academy in Centerville, where a teacher encouraged him to develop his talent for writing. While Lew did not see combat, he did serve in the Mexican–American War. In 1849, Lew was admitted to the bar and became engaged to Susan Arnold Elston, with the marriage taking place in 1852. He moved to Crawfordsville in 1853. At the outbreak of the Civil War, Governor Oliver P. Morton invited Lew to recruit volunteers for the army. Lew was soon promoted to the rank of brigadier general. He became something of a scapegoat when the victory at Shiloh came under heavy criticism for the high number of casualties. The injury to General Wallace’s military reputation was a topic he returned to repeatedly during the rest of his life. General Grant eventually modified his earlier criticism, thereby helping exonerate General Wallace. Meanwhile, Wallace distinguished himself by preventing the capture of Washington, D.C., by the Confederacy.

President Rutherford B. Hayes appointed Lew Wallace to the governorship of the New Mexico Territory, where Wallace spent three years. He completed the manuscript for Ben–Hur while living in Santa Fe; he had begun the work while living in Crawfordsville. President James A. Garfield then appointed Wallace U.S. Minister to the Ottoman Empire in Constantinople, Turkey, where Wallace lived for four years.

In 1900, Ben–Hur had outsold Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Between 1895 and 1898, Wallace built a study adjacent to his home in Crawfordsville. As Robert entered the Devon to see the movie Ben–Hur, he thought back to the park-like setting where the brick study with its Byzantine, Greek, and Romanesque influences stands. He remembered the tower and the domed copper roof with its skylight. He also remembered the chair in which Lew Wallace sat while writing Ben–Hur. Most of all, he remembered Wallace’s art, for he was an accomplished painter.

As Robert took his seat in the Devon, he was within a short distance of the location where another writer, Bernard Sobel, had been born in 1887, the same year that Robert’s grandmother Kosie was born. Sobel’s father, Nathan, manufactured cigars at the family home on the north side of Washington Street not far from the corner formed with McDonald. Robert could easily have walked there from the Devon. Nathan and wife, Hattie, moved their family to Ferry Street in Lafayette. Eventually, Bernard attended Purdue, where he played violin in the orchestra. He made his way to New York City, where he became a drama critic for the New York Daily Mirror. Bernard Sobel handled publicity for several Broadway producers. Among them were both A. L. Erlanger, who (with Marc Klaw) produced the 1899 stage version of Ben–Hur as dramatized by William W. Young, and Flo Ziegfield, who held an interest in the 1925 silent film of Ben–Hur. Sobel wrote numerous articles and a handful of plays. Between 1931 and 1961, Sobel published seven books.

In preparation for viewing the movie, Robert had read General Lew Wallace’s Ben–Hur: A Tale of the Christ. Robert even had made for his brother a plaster Nativity set that Robert had painted according to the colorful descriptions given by Wallace.

Robert marveled at the spectacular scenes and the breathtaking action. He particularly enjoyed the music of Miklós Rózsa. Robert exited the theater inspired by director William Wyler’s Ben-Hur, the MGM blockbuster based on a novel by a Hoosier author.

As the movie lasted nearly four hours, Robert had little time to sleep before his parents drove him to Indianapolis for the trip to Gettsyburg and Washington, D.C.   

32. The Indiana State 4-H Band ... THE FARM EAST OF PINE VILLAGE

In the second summer that Robert participated in Ouibache, he played clarinet in the Indiana State 4-H Band.

It was the summer before his junior year, and the big concert band was 116 members strong. The director was Roger C. Heath, who was an assistant director at Purdue University. He would go on to found the band program at Virginia Tech. He had earned his degrees at the University of Colorado and had taught in Montana before coming to Purdue.

Heath had assembled a challenging concert for such a young concert band with limited rehearsal time. Part I included “Slavonic Folk Suite,” and Part II concluded with “Stars and Stripes Forever.”

The director tolerated no monkey business, and he demanded excellence. Robert’s jaw grew tired from playing passages again and again with only seconds of instruction in between. Everyone felt increasingly on edge. During the rare breaks, band members discerned that Mr. Heath was displeased.

The final rehearsal before the concert was tense.

“Trombones,” Mr. Heath said, “that passage must be cleaner. Try it again!” He gave the downbeat with his baton. “No! Cleaner! Try again!” Another downbeat. “Still not clean enough! Again!”

Next, the tempo was of concern. “Band, you are rushing!” Mr. Heath said. “Keep your eyes up here, and keep the tempo with me!”

The band played the passage again.

“Still rushing! Still not looking up here!”

The volume was a problem. Mr. Heath said, “The audience wants to hear the piccolo. You must bring down the volume!”

The band played the passage again.

“Still can’t hear the piccolo! Still not bringing down the volume! Again!”

The band played the passage another time.

Finally, there was no time left.

Mr. Heath set down his baton and stared at the band for several seconds. “This evening,” he began, “I will be all smiles and roses, no matter how well or how poorly you perform. At the end, I will still be all smiles and roses, but, if you have performed poorly, I will not tell you that you performed well. I will simply say nothing.”

With those words, Mr. Heath turned on his heel and was gone.    

 

On that Tuesday evening, June 30th of 1970, the band members slowly filed onto the stage of the vast Edward C. Elliott Hall of Music for the Seventh Annual Concert of the Indiana State 4-H Band, to perform for the public during the Fifty-Second Annual 4-H Club Roundup.

Robert felt dread all the way to his toes, and his stomach kept doing somersaults. He could not remember ever having been so nervous before a band concert, although he certainly had experienced nervousness before many a piano solo. He took his place amid the clarinet section. (A few years later, he would be first chair of the second clarinets in the famed Indiana University Marching Hundred, and, in Robert’s senior year in college, he would be named the Outstanding Bandsman, an honor he would share with drum major Fred Kelly.)

Wearing a black suit and bow tie, Mr. Heath stepped onto the stage to the applause of the packed hall.

He was all smiles and roses.

During the intermission, he was all smiles and roses.

At the end of the concert, he remained all smiles and roses.

Robert breathed a big sigh of relief when the program was over. The music had made a hit with the audience, for the applause was like thunder. After bowing, Mr. Heath turned to the band and said, “You—were—excellent!” enunciating each word so that he could be heard over the applause. He immediately pointed to the piccolo player to stand for special acknowledgment; then he waved all the band members to their feet to be congratulated.

The next summer, Robert was back for more.

The director of the 1971 Indiana State 4-H Band was William D. Kisinger, also an assistant at Purdue. Affable and easygoing, Mr. “Bill” Kisinger greeted the 111 band members warmly.

With his head held high and his chin up, Mr. Kisinger said, in his characteristic rapid pattern, often nodding. “I want to welcome you to the campus of Purdue University and to say how much I’m looking forward to working with you and to tell you that we are going to be making music! We have charts that are really exciting, and we’re going to be a big hit, and the audience is going to love us!”

With those positive sentiments, Mr. Kisinger began the rehearsal. He often left the baton lying on the stand and conducted with his hands.

Mr. Kisinger was a product of the University of Illinois, which had a tradition of innovation going back to the earliest years of marching band performances at football games. He embodied assurance and confidence.

Mr. Kisinger liked what he heard from the 4-H band, and he would like it even more if the trumpets could keep their bells up. Brass instruments were suddenly lifted higher. If an entire section missed a note, he calmly stepped down from the platform, strode over, picked up the music from one of the stands, pointed at it, and said, “Not your fault! Transcription error! There was supposed to be a flat there, so let’s make it a B flat in bar 77, and does everyone have a pencil—if not, there’s one over here—and now we know it’s a B flat in bar 77, so let’s hear it, beginning with bar 75 and one, two, three, four!” He had hopped back onto the platform by the end of his statement and was counting and conducting. He beamed when he heard the B flat, and he went on without stopping.

Breaks were timed well, and the ratio of instruction to playing was just right.

On a ridiculously hot Monday evening, June 28th in 1971, Mr. Kisinger stepped onto the stage of the Slayter Center, a spacious band shell that looked like Alexander Calder’s answer to Stonehenge supported by an enormous tripod. The stage was only seven years old. Mr. Kisinger was in a short-sleeve shirt and wore a 4-H cap.

Every moment of the concert was fun.

When the band performed a medley of songs from West Side Story, Robert could hardly believe his ears: “Tonight” had such a sumptuous sound, and “America” had such a driving rhythm!

The hill stretching away from the stage was so full of families sitting on blankets that almost none of the green grass was showing. At concert’s end, with one accord, the audience stood to applaud and applaud, until Mr. Kisinger announced an encore number, for which he had planned all along and which the band had rehearsed.

From his two years in the Indiana State 4-H Band, Robert took away the realization that excellence can result from at least two divergent methods: from strict discipline leading to the attainment of a high standard or from amiable collaboration bringing about a joy in a job well done. In the spring of 1972, he auditioned for Mr. Frederick C. Ebbs, director of bands at Indiana University, and was accepted into the renowned Marching Hundred. Robert wondered which pedagogical styles directors Mr. Ebbs, Mr. Ray Cramer, and Mr. Wilbur T. England would evince.     

31. The Past ... THE FARM EAST OF PINE VILLAGE

In 1956, the National Safety Council, working with automobile associations, reached agreement on a standard size of automobile license plate with mounting holes in the same places on all plates. Those plates issued in Indiana in 1955 complied with the new regulations. When Robert was in third grade, the Indiana Bureau of Motor Vehicles began issuing plates with a one- or two-digit prefix assigned to each county alphabetically, with the large-population counties of Marion and Lake receiving additional prefixes. Robert’s home county, Warren, was 86. Letters of the alphabet after the prefixes represented further refinements in coding the locations, as in 86A or 86B.

When Robert was in the fourth grade, the postal service began recommending the use of two-letter abbreviations representing the various states, but most people continued to use “Ind.” The abbreviation “IN” was not in common use until sometime after the Zone Improvement Plan, or ZIP Codes, became mandatory for bulk mail in 1967. Robert did not like the two-letter abbreviation because he thought the way he formed his handwritten I looked confusing with his handwritten N. He resorted to printing the “IN”—which he thought looked strange when the rest of the address was written in his longhand, or cursive.

In the 1960s, dialing only numbers became the common method for using a telephone to call someone. The dialing was done, in fact, with a dial, which had holes to accept the fingertip used to spin the dial the correct length for each number. To accommodate more than one party on the same line, the ring pattern indicated which house was being called; for example, with two parties, the phone would ring with long rings in rhythmic succession to indicate one home and with two short rings followed by slight pauses to indicate the other home.

By the early 1970s, men’s hair had become long. In the early 1960s, the Beatles had begun to change attitudes about men’s haircuts, but it was not until 1971 and 1972 that the hairstyles of men in such rural communities as Pine Village had made the full transition into long hair. In the decade after Robert graduated from high school, the caboose would vanish from the train while the pump would switch to self-serve gasoline. 

Such changes as license plate sizes, license plate numbering, state abbreviations, ZIP Codes, dialing phone numbers, and men’s hairstyles were noticeable. Other changes were less so.

In the 1930s, metallic oxides, such as rust, were used by paint manufacturers to make a cheap—but poor quality—paint for barns and outbuildings. When Robert was small, several barns in rural Indiana were painted cheaply, and the color was nearly a dark orange with much of the wood grain showing through, as if the building were stained, rather than painted. Joe referred to the orange hue as “turkey blood” because, when the earliest painting of barns occurred, some milk-based paints had been mixed with blood to form a red color. Throughout the years that Robert was in the Pine Village School, fewer and fewer barns were coated with the rusty orange paint.

In 1900, when the U.S. population was a fraction of what it would become, more than twenty million gallons of sorghum were produced. Sorghum is a cereal grain that is harvested for human consumption in some parts of the world. Benjamin Franklin wrote about using sorghum straw for brooms, but not until a century later was sorghum widely cultivated in the U.S. The Fourteenth Annual Report of the Ohio State Board of Agriculture (1859, published in 1860) announced that the state fair had witnessed “many samples of syrup of the Sorgho, or Chinese Sugar Cane.” As late nineteenth-century homes had gallon containers of sorghum syrup (a.k.a. sorghum molasses) to pour on buckwheat pancakes, to sweeten baked beans, to make cookies, and to flavor bread, there was widespread interest in techniques for boiling the juice from the crushed sorghum stalks to transform into syrup. According to the Report of the Commissioner of Agriculture for the Year 1867, 6,698,181 gallons of sorghum molasses were recorded in the census for 1860. Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, and Missouri were responsible for approximately half the total production in 1867. When Robert was small, fields of sorghum were not uncommon. By the time he was in high school, sorghum had virtually vanished. During his years in the Pine Village School, more and more farm families quit using molasses. Syrups were readily available in grocery stores.

Molasses could be added to livestock feed; for example, Joe often asked the Pine Village Feed Store to add molasses to the ground feed that he purchased to serve his Holsteins on Christmas Day. Joe wanted his cows to have a special treat. Ground feed was usually a light sandy color; the molasses feed looked like light brown sugar. Over the course of Robert’s childhood, farms were gradually becoming larger and less diversified; accordingly, fewer farms raised livestock. Incrementally, livestock fences were torn down, and fields of corn and soybeans were planted right up to the roadside ditches. Molasses and fields of sorghum became relics of the past.

Little by little, the old ways were disappearing. Joe told Robert that Don Akers and he had once put a floor in a bridge over the dredge ditch on the Thomason place. Three trees, fourteen inches in diameter, served as beams, and planks were laid at right angles over the trees. “It was almost dark by the time we got those last planks in place,” Joe said. He and Don dipped 60-penny nails in a can of grease and pounded them down. A new moon came up. “If the old-timers are right,” Joe said to Don, “the nails will pop up.” ... and, sure enough, every month, the nails kept working up, according to Joe. Such a notion—even one unsupported by scientific inquiry—was a thing to be appreciated, as it contributed to the spice of life, if nothing else.

There were jobs to be done during a new moon, when the light of the moon was absent from the sky at night, and jobs to be done during a waxing moon. Activities for the new moon included planting root crops, such as potatoes, and making sauerkraut. Those for the waxing moon included planting vegetables that are harvested above ground and butchering hogs. Pork produced during a new moon would shrink and turn tough when cooked.

Ida warned Robert never to thank anyone for a plant because doing so would cause the plant to wither away and perish. A common occurrence in the spring and fall was the trading of plants among rural women. Mrs. Bowen would pull into the driveway, open the trunk of her car, and haul out a bucket full of daisies in the springtime or a bucket full of iris tubers in the late autumn. “I thought you’d want some of these,” she would say to Ida, and Ida would stop whatever she had been doing and would gleefully take the time to choose a location and to plant the contents of the bucket—while sharing the latest news with Mrs. Bowen. In turn, Ida would dig peonies or poppies or crown imperials to take to Mrs. Bowen, as well as other women in the community, and no one ever said so much as a “thank you.” Such superstitions lent charm to living. While some superstitions persisted, many others gradually disappeared.