Over the past 10 months, one event after another has uncovered an Indiana rooted in the past. It started on a sunny June day in 2018, seventy-five people gathered in Milan, Indiana, to rededicate a water tower. The tower was coated with a fresh coat of paint and the words “STATE CHAMPS 1954” in white block letters on the black tank. It is a memorial to tiny Milan High School, who in 1954 won the single-class Indiana State Basketball championship. It’s a marvelous story and great part of Hoosier history.
What many don’t remember is that there was a growing drumbeat for multi-class basketball tournaments based on school enrollment in the late 1940s. Milan’s win ended such talk and over the next 43 years, no small school won State. Meanwhile, over half of the participating schools disappeared due to consolidation and annual tournament attendance fell by half. When Indiana adopted a multi-class format in 1997, Hoosiers were outraged nonetheless.
The newly painted water tower in Milan was built by a furniture factory owner for fire protection. The factory is long gone. The tower has been dry for decades.
The same week of the water tower rededication, the Indiana Republican Party set its platform for the upcoming 2018 election that included “marriage between a man and a woman.” Never mind that gay marriage had been legalized in the United States of America from sea to shining sea three years earlier. Since the Indiana Republican party controls the Governor’s mansion, the Attorney General office, and a super majority in the legislative chambers of the House and Senate, what they say becomes law. They appeared ready to turn back the clock, or at least to pander to those who hadn’t moved their clocks forward.
In July, someone leaked information that the Indiana legislature had launched a secret investigation into Attorney General Curtis Hill for groping six women. First, lawmakers of the controlling party screamed louder about the leak than the behavior. Eventually a special investigator, Daniel Sigler, was appointed. He interviewed 56 witnesses and found the allegations against Hill to be “credible and true.”
“I did believe them,” Sigler said of the accusers. “Nonetheless, I decided I didn’t think I could meet my burden” of proof. Later, he added, “This would be a drawn out, complicated — legally and factually — case that would last a long, long time,” he said. “The victims would be put through a heck of a lot. It would be a tough, tough case to prove.”
Keith Cooper—a man who served 8 years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit and whom former Governor Mike Pence refused to pardon—was convicted on flimsier evidence.
The whole scene resembled an episode of “Mad Men,” the television show set in the sexist, three-martini-lunch era of the 1960s. Some folks rejoiced over the outcome as a victory over political correctness. Republican politicians called for Hill to resign. He refused. Rather than commit to updating the archaic law (Indiana statute requires proof of intent to touch another person in a “rude, insolent, or angry manner” for battery conviction), or impeach Hill, Indiana legislature shrugged and moved on.
Indiana moves slowly sometimes. It was the last state in the country to allow Sunday beer sales.
One bad egg doesn’t represent everyone. True. But then Hoosiers learned that while the Hill investigation was going on, Speaker of the House, Brian Bosma, spent $40,000 in campaign funds to gather dirt and intimidate a former intern with whom he’d had a sexual fling 26 years earlier. Linda Pence, the investigating attorney Bosma hired, threatened the former intern and her family members that if any of them told her story about the 1992 tryst with then-married Bosma, Pence would expose every unflattering detail of the intern’s life.
In 1992, Indiana license plates displayed the motto, Hoosier Hospitality.
Indiana Republicans stood strong. “We stand with Speaker Brian Bosma against this attempt by the Indianapolis Star to discredit him, a conservative leader, with uncorroborated allegations,” House GOP members wrote. “Stand by him 100 percent as he continues to lead our state forward.”
They must have their gears confused. Powerful men of wealth intimidating poor women into submission is the way backward, not forward.
Bosma was re-elected and remained Speaker of the House. He then participated in drafting the Indiana legislature’s new sexual harassment policy.
The #MeToo movement hasn’t arrived here yet.
As 2018 ground on and the high school basketball season warmed up, so did debate over the state basketball tournament. Private schools were experiencing great success and many started to ask: Should private schools have their own state basketball tournament? It wasn’t a new idea—Catholic schools and segregated black high schools were barred from the Indiana state basketball tournament before 1943. So, it was a call to return to the past. Nearly every discussion included a single-class vs. multi-class argument.
One discussion went like this:
Bob: You are ok with class sports except Indiana HS basketball which has been here 20+ years. Kids have been born, played basketball their entire lives, & graduated college all in the class age. It’s time to move on.
Melvin: Listen to me carefully…I…do…not…care. For anybody that ever loved the tradition of Indiana high school basketball, going to a class system ruined it. Prattle on all you wish but no amount of twaddle from you will change that fact.
Bob: It’s what the student athletes wanted and continue to want. It’s not about you—it’s about the student athletes. Better? worse? Nope, just different.
Melvin: I am not prepared to indulge the need for validation of a student-athlete who is perturbed that his team is not good enough to compete at the highest level. That’s life kid. It is was the single tournament that gave Indiana basketball the legendary status that it had and it was the class tournament that killed that. There is absolutely nothing you can say to change my mind about that. You might as well try to tell me that 2+2=6.
Infamous Hoosier Congressman Earl Landgrebe couldn’t have said it better. In the waning days of the Watergate scandal, Landgrebe stood by his president, Richard Nixon. “Don’t confuse me with the facts,” Landgrebe said, “I’ve got a closed mind. I will not vote for impeachment. I’m going to stick with my president even if he and I have to be taken out of this building and shot.”
Nixon resigned the next day.
In January 2019, Hoosiers focused their basketball attention on archrivals Purdue and Indiana University. The rivalry is legendary. In its hey-day, Purdue was led by Gene Keady, the man who refused to back down and challenged Indiana’s Bob Knight for basketball supremacy in Indiana. Knight won three national championships while coaching the IU Hoosiers, the last one occurred in 1987. Knight was also known for vulgarity, violent outbursts, demeaning the women’s coach, choking a player in practice, and throwing a chair across the basketball court during a game.
Purdue won the first game between the two teams in late January on its home court. A month later in Assembly Hall on IU’s campus, Purdue beat Indiana for the fifth time in a row.
During the game, frustrated Indiana fans taunted Purdue center, Matt Haarms, every time he touched the ball: “Fuck you, Haarms!” Clap-clap. Clap-clap-clap.
Immediately after the game, calls to bring back Bobby Knight shouted from shadowed corners of the Internet. Bobby would never let Purdue run roughshod over our team! He never would have let them get away with such foul-mouthed poor sportsmanship! He would have grabbed the microphone and made them stop.
Take us back, Bobby Knight.
There are some trying to move Indiana forward. South Bend’s mayor, Pete Buttigieg, is a gay, Millenial, war veteran running for President of the United States. After 100 years of trying, Save the Dunes finally got the United States Congress to declare the Indiana Dunes a National Park. Republican Governor Eric Holcomb called for state legislators to pass a hate crimes law (Indiana is one of only 5 states with no law against bias-motivated violence or intimidation).
But for every step forward, the state seems to take two steps backward. The Governor’s hate crime bill would allow a judge to impose stricter sentencing on a criminal for an act of violent or intimidation if they deem factors such “race, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability” were part of the crime. Republican legislators gutted the specific characteristics and inserted the word “bias.” It “covers everyone” and “everybody can be included” now, GOP politicians said in defense of the change.
Huzzah! Heterosexual white people no longer need to tolerate the violence, discrimination, and indignation they have long suffered in Indiana thanks to this bold move.
Tax accountant Nancy Fivecoate of Russiaville, Indiana, surely sighed in relief. After doing Bailey Brazzel’s taxes for the past four years, Fivecoate learned that Brazzel got married last year to a fellow woman named Samantha. Fivecoate wasn’t having it.
“I am a Christian and I believe marriage is between one man and one woman,” Fivecoate said in a statement. “I was very respectful to them. I told them where I thought she might be able to get her taxes prepared.”
Few people knew that doing the taxes of a gay person forced an account to join the gay lifestyle.
“The LGBT want respect for their beliefs, which I give them. I did not say anything about their lifestyle. That is their choice. It is not my choice. Where is their respect for my beliefs?” Fivecoate wondered.
Refusing to generate tax return forms for a gay couple shows the same respect as a tow truck driver who arrives upon a car stuck in a snowy ditch bank, sees a gay pride sticker in the rear window, and respects the occupants’ lifestyle by respectfully leaving them stranded.
Perhaps our schools will teach the next generation to do better. Enter Hamilton Southeastern Schools, Fishers, Indiana. There, a member of the boys swim team sexually harassed members of the girls swim team over an extended period of time. It got so bad, swimmers complained to a teacher, who reported it. The school found the girls had “substantiated claims.” The boy was suspended.
Then the school scratched a line in the sexual harassment beach sand just before high tide. The girls swim season ended and the boys swim team was set to contend for a state title. The school reinstated the harasser since there were no longer any female swimmers around the pool to harass. The swim team finished sixth at the state meet.
Many Hoosiers are ready to move forward. They respect gay marriage, want a strong hate crime law, rebuke sexism, and demand long-overdue pay raises for teachers. We can respect the past and accept the future. My grandmother, an old school Hoosier, used to talk about life—she lived through the Great Depression and World War II—and how much things had changed. Then she smiled, nodded her head, and said, “Changes, changes, changes.” She knew no fear or anger.
Other Hoosiers step to their screen door, peer outside over a Hoosier Hospitality door mat, see the world changing, and keep the door latch fixed. They move back to an old, comfortable armchair in front of a television set, the 1954 Indiana state basketball championship is replaying again and again.
I wish more people aspired to be like my grandmother.