Back Home Again in Indiana….
Back Home Again in Indiana
“Back Home Again in Indiana” is our state song (composed, btw, by the brother of the great author Theodore Dreiser), and it’s sung to start our little local race (aka The Indianapolis 500). Here is the annual rendition by the late great Jim Nabors. Now I am always “back home again” because I live smack-dab in the middle of the state in Indianapolis. But when I hear this song, I am transported back to the Indiana I knew first— “the Region” in NW Indiana, just east of Chicago. This is where I was born and my mother grew up and my grandparents worked. It also has the only bit of the Great Lakes assigned to Indiana (43 miles of beach between Illinois and Michigan).
Whiting
Back in my childhood, it was hard-bitten gritty area, full of steel mills and oil refineries and men who worked night shift in factories and women who worked day shift in diners. Now there’s still an oil refinery and a couple steel mills. But the terrible pollution is mitigated (thank you, EPA), and the old industrial wasteland where we used to play is now a public golf course.
This spring, my husband Jeff and I travelled up there in our never-ending quest to visit and write about most of the towns in the state. First we went to Whiting, my mom’s birthplace, now a cute little town still dominated by the towering Catholic church steeples. This has always been a town of immigrants, Eastern Europeans in the 20th Century, and Hispanics in the 21st Century, all drawn by the prospect of union wages and proximity to the big city.
What’s changed in the decades since I spent summers with Grandma? Now many of the residents work in the Loop in Chicago, not the mills. The downtown is still bustling, but now the practical stores are joined by artisan shops and restaurants. The population was always diverse, if by “diverse” you mean different Eastern European groups! Now almost half the population is Hispanic, so now there’s a Spanish-speaking Catholic church along with the Slovak one and the Polish one.
I was able to navigate us back to the house where my mom grew up. It must be 100 years old—a pretty typical worker’s house. It looks much the same, except now the porch is enclosed, and my grandmother’s hyacinths are gone, along with my grandfather’s workshop. And I have to say, the expansive backyard has shrunk. (Jeff suggested that it could be I’m just remembering with a child’s vision.) I stood there on White Oak Ave, and remembered my grandmother standing on that porch and calling down to neighbors to come over for coffee.
Beverly Shores and the Beach
Then we drove twenty miles east along the shore of Lake Michigan to Beverly Shores and the lake cottage our family shared in the mid-century. This is a little cottage at the bottom of a dune, about three blocks from the lake, which is now part of the Indiana National Lakeshore. My grandfather and his brothers and brothers-in-law built this cottage in the years after WWII. (My father said he wasn’t allowed to marry my mother until he helped put on a new roof.) I remember there was only a pump in the front for water, and no bathroom for most of my childhood. (We were kids—peeing in the outhouse was part of the fun.) Now my cousins the DeLunas have renovated the cottage, and it’s just adorable.
Grandma and Grandpa would be pleased to see how the DeLunas have improved the cottage while keeping its rustic charm. They did keep the old pump, but the outhouse is gone. 😊
Memory is funny. I sat in with my cousins that little front room in front of the huge fireplace, and suddenly remembered that my grandparents had a record player over there on the window sill. They had only three records, and we played them incessantly, and I can probably still sing every one of them: “Tan Shoes and Pink Shoelaces,” “Tootie Fruity,” and “Secret Agent Man.”
Later that evening, we stood on the beach at sunset and looked across the lake. Amazingly, we could see the fuzzy outlines of the skyscrapers in downtown Chicago—35 miles away. (Jeff and I met at the University of Chicago, so that was home too.)
The Chicago skyline, seen from across Lake Michigan, explained …
