Michael Johnson's
Deer Crick Diaries
First in a Series
The sophisticated 1999 July 4th parade in downtown Delphi, Indiana--with an elephant! What will they think of next? Welcome to my sleepy hometown: Ma & Pa Kettle & bowling ruled
Delphi--She's Beautiful:
Look Her Over!*
*These words for years were written on the official welcome sign on
Indiana Route 25 for tourists entering Delphi, Indiana.EDITOR'S NOTE: This is the first in a series of excerpts from the book-length memoirs of Michael Johnson, covering his youth in Delphi, Indiana, where his family published the local newspaper and he first began to absorb what he needed for a life as a professional reporter and writer.
By MICHAEL JOHNSON
for TheColumnists.com
THERE USED TO BE A BIG SIGN in the weeds outside of Delphi, Indiana, along Route 25, that said: "Delphi, She's Beautiful. Look her over." It was aimed at getting tourists to take an interest in the town. In fact, I never once saw a tourist walking around my hometown, soaking up the sights. One glance and they stepped on the gas. Vrrroooom!
Delphi in the 1940s and 1950s was a typical midwestern settlement living off the surrounding farmers. Population struggled to stay at 2,500. The young were already looking for broader horizons. The Johnson house was lively with our own expanding brood--finally ending with six children when my mother was physically exhausted--and a parade of visitors home from the war.
My father's partner, Gilbert Loudon, came back with a copy of his new book, "Boot." I thought it had something to do with Italy, but no, it was just an affectionate portrait of boot camp in the Army. One of us must have inherited the last remaining copy. Poor Gil later sold his half-interest in The Delphi Citizen, the local newspaper my father published, and moved to New York to pursue a writing career. He ended up on the New York Times Sunday Magazine, but, sadly, committed suicide in a New York hotel room. Nostalgic for Delphi, perhaps? I doubt it.
The Johnson family peaked at about this time. We were featured as a typical American family on a Voice of America broadcast on the rock-solid values of middle America. We were all interviewed separately, then forced to play our musical instruments. At that age I played one-finger piano. We closed by singing some drippy song like "Bless This House."
As part of the end-of-war reconciliation, "good Germans" were sent around the country to apologize to the victorious nation. They even sent one lovely little fraulein to Delphi. She was the first foreigner I met--a pretty blonde, about 25, with all her equipment in the right place. I have no memory of her speech, except that all students, including us Catholics, were convened in the public high school study hall for the occasion. What an apparition she was. I spent the afternoon staring at her tight, white blouse, which had a flower pattern stitched in it, each petal cut out for ventilation. My eyesight was never very good, but it was good enough to see this. It was the closest I had yet come to observing a grown woman's underwear in use.
I remember life "on
the hill" in a huge wooden house with a big Midwestern-style
front porch and a Victory Garden in which, like all good Americans,
we grew as much of our food as possible for the war effort. I
can recall walking around in the garden among stalks of broccoli
or some other green plant that was taller than I was, so I must
have been about three years old. This was 1942 or so. And I clearly
remember V-E Day, when we were all asked to grab pots and pans
and hurry down to the Court House Square to march in celebration
banging the stuff together. But we were told not to relax yet
because Japan's evil old Tojo hadn't been defeated. It was
far too complicated to understand, but the celebration was noisy
and an impressive new experience for a toddler.
Tojo's PR men couldn't have found a more ridiculous name for
him as the last villain of the war if they had tried. It
was perfect for building up nationalistic hatred. We all talked
about him. I wonder if he realized what a household name he had
become. The papers were full of cartoons of the Japanese as monkeys,
treating them as subhumans. Hard to believe in today's pro-Japanese
context.
Much later, in about 1966, I was back in town with my soon-to-be wife, hob-nobbing with Delphi folk, and I remember noticing that the old home town had lost some of its simple country optimism. People were afraid of everything. Al Moss, the man who bought out The Citizen, told me over dinner he was sure that if the Communists took over he would be at the top of the list of people they would be looking for. And another guy, owner of the local furniture store, actually brandished a handgun in his front yard and said he was ready for the day "the niggers come down from Chicago." Something was going wrong. Maybe it was Nixon's fault.
It might intrigue younger generations to know that our second house, on Wilson Street, had no door keys. We always left the keys in the car as well. Trust is a beautiful thing, and a habit difficult to break. When I got my first job and bought a 1948 Dodge for $140 I parked it in front of my apartment in Hayward, California. After about a week, somebody drove off in it, probably not believing his luck. And when I moved to New York, I still hadn't learned. I didn't bother to double-lock my door when I went to work at the Associated Press headquarters in Rockefeller Center. It was only a matter of a month or two before somebody entered the place in broad daylight, stole all my suits, shirts and ties, packed them up in my suitcases, and disappeared. The police actually yawned as I filled out the report. It took me a year to pay back the bank loan I needed to get a change of clothes.
What did we do for fun
in Delphi? Delphi's only place of non-alcoholic entertainment
was the Roxy, which changed movies once a week. (Remember, there
was no TV yet.) Our parents' favorite was the Ma and Pa Kettle
series of hillbilly comedies. Then in about 1950, a bowling alley
arrived. It was the biggest thing to happen to Delphi in decades--actually
an alternative to the movies, right there on the slummy West
Side (As opposed to what?? There was no east side or south or
north).
The Citizen had its very own
bowling team, and Thursday night was sacred. This was my
father's big night out, and he never missed it. He dressed
in his billowing aqua bowling shirt and, as we were finishing
our dinner of canned peas and turnips, he stood beside the dinner
table and filed his fingernails before leaving for the weekly
competition. The bowling alley was truly an exciting place--all
new, polished pinewood, big heavy crashing balls, the likes of
which we had never seen or heard of. The pins were set manually
by some of the braver high school kids who crouched above the
pins and jumped down each time to replace them.
We also seemed to have a number of spectacular fires to excite us. The clothing store across from the bank burned down. (I sneaked into the ruins with some friends after the embers cooled and walked off with some water-soaked shirts and boots.) Some kind of canning factory also exploded and shot cans of tomatoes all over town. A few years later, Clifford's, the town's main clothing store burned down. In retrospect it seems like a lot of fire for such a small town.
I shouldn't give the impression that all our contemporaries in town were hopeless hicks. Somehow a few families managed to maintain contact with other worlds. There were the McCains, whose son Doug was a ham radio expert and went to Berkeley to get a Ph.D. in physics. There were the swinging Bradshaws, the Tom Peters and Abner Bowen families. And Bill Gros, son of the doctor who delivered most of us, was strangely sophisticated. He became an Episcopal priest.
Tom and Phoebe Peters were too classy for Delphi. Tom owned the local furniture factory. Phoebe was artistic and subscribed to Harper's Bazaar, probably the sole subscriber in town, as we were for The New Yorker. (The only other Phoebe I ever heard of was Holden Caulfield's sister in Catcher in the Rye). Tom was a sophisticated guy who had invested a few thousand in a small share in Fiddler on the Roof and made a nice return. Eventally they got fed up with Delphi and moved to Lafayette (marginally better, perhaps) and Tom did a reverse commute to Delphi.
Some of the Delphi-area names were downright Dickensian. You couldn't make these up: Mindwell Crampton, Naomi Theophile, Myron Beesley, and Dorsey Vass.
I guess I knew I would never be the mayor of Delphi the day I accidentally offended insurance broker Howard Bradshaw on one of my rare trips back home about 30 years ago. Howard was sitting around a big round table at the Country Club talking about himself. Finally he came to the subject of culture, and told us that in his retirement he was etching glass panes based on drawings he traced from children's coloring books. Before I could get a grip, I heard myself saying to him, "Oh, interesting subjects for art. Like rubber duckies?" He said nothing but there was a pause, and I still recall his steely gaze. He seemed to be saying "Smart ass. I'll never pay off your claims."
Someone sent me the URL
for the Delphi website a few years ago and it is full of truly
hilarious stuff. "Beautiful Greek revival court house"?
How about typical Midwestern cookie-cutter architecture, or Court-house-in-a-box?
"Swanky Hill Crest Manor"? Oh, please. If Delphi had
any charm it was its smallness and its isolation from a turbulent
world. Delphi was born to be mild. Always was, always will be.
© 2001 by Michael Johnson.
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 Michael Johnson |
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