Mark Bennett
The Tribune-Star
TERRE HAUTE —
Work with me, folks.
Grab your cellphone, stand in front of a 2010 calendar, stretch out that arm, and snap a picture yourself. Now, go to your computer and write a paragraph describing the person in that photograph to someone living in the year 2092.
Don’t forget — this isn’t necessarily an explanation of how you want to be remembered, but rather how you will be remembered. That’s the nature of a snapshot. It’s a moment in history.
Americans love taking snapshots, especially of themselves. (Our new national symbol should be a cellphone user reaching out to click their self-portrait.) And, apparently, Hoosiers also love the historical snapshot of Terre Haute crafted by author Tom Roznowski.
This month, the Indiana University Press publishing company issued a second printing of Roznowski’s 2009 book, “An American Hometown: Terre Haute, Indiana, 1927.” In a nutshell, that means “An American Hometown” sold more copies in one year than IU Press projected.
People find our town interesting.
“It’s an Indiana book, and its market and audience is statewide, not just Terre Haute,” said Linda Oblack, regional books editor for IU Press in Bloomington, “because it’s really a glimpse of not just Terre Haute, but what life was like in that period in time.”
Roznowski, who lives in Bloomington, spent 15 years visiting and researching Terre Haute. He began narrating a series of radio vignettes about the city — 31⁄2 minutes each — for WFIU in 1995. The series grew into 450 episodes. Eventually, Roznowski compiled his book.
He chose a unusual format for “An American Hometown.” Real Terre Haute residents are listed alphabetically, just as they were in the 1927 Polk city directory. But the entries go beyond the name, job and whether the person is a homeowner, renter or occupant of the Vigo County Poor Farm. Roznowski dug into the past, piecing together the stories and businesses behind those names. He interviewed Hauteans who were alive in 1927, talked with local historians, and combed through old newspapers. Sometimes, he had to speculate to fill in the gaps lost to time.
So, readers get to know people such as James B. Harvell, Terre Haute’s “Hot Tamale Man.” Every night a 9 o’clock, Harvell pushed his vendor cart through the downtown district, selling that Mexican treat made of ground beef, peppers and sauce, wrapped in a dried corn husk. They’ll find Charles Jensen, the only professional umpire in the directory. He’d worked the exhibition game between the St. Louis Cardinals and the Terre Haute Tots — the city’s Class B minor league team — at Memorial Stadium in 1926. The Cardinals, with Hall of Famers Rogers Hornsby and Jim Bottomley, survived a ninth-inning Tots rally and won. They also meet the Rev. Melrose E. Lewis, a traveling evangelist who “spoke at any church or tent revival that would have him, relying on the offerings and hospitality of the multitudes.”
Pages 55 and 56 feature six paragraphs on the life and occupation of Nellie Cook, the city’s only professional physiognomist. Her job — judging human character by the presence of certain physical features. “An American Hometown” contained cake bakers, writers, a Ku Klux Klan leader, and music, industriousness, injustice, crime and joy. Real stuff at a moment in time during the 1920s.
The more Roznowski researched its past and visited present-day Terre Haute, the more he became enthralled by this place along the Wabash River — in ways many of us Hauteans overlook.
“Discovering it from the outside was really essential to me,” he said Tuesday. “I didn’t have any preconceptions.”
Now, he has invited friends from Bloomington to visit a city many have never seen, even though it’s just 60 miles away.
Born in Syracuse, N.Y., and raised in Albany, N.Y., Roznowski moved to Indiana as a young man, settling and marrying in Bloomington. He knew little about Terre Haute when he walked into a Bloomington bookstore and found “Terre Haute: A Pictorial History” by Dorothy Jerse and Judith Calvert. It contained numerous photos by well-known Terre Haute photographer Ken Martin. The city “seemed to me to be a slice of Americana,” Roznowski said.
He was hooked.
As Roznowski and Oblack began discussing a book, those old Polk city directories kept coming up. “We said, ‘What would be really fascinating would be to go back and revisit some of those families,’” Oblack recalled.
Roznowski is grateful that Oblack believed in the possibilities of a book about Terre Haute — a city stereotyped and maligned for years. “She had some people to convince,” Roznowski said.
Turns out, their faith in the town’s interest paid off.
Roznowski sees great things under way in Terre Haute today, especially the Riverscape project, the revival of organized baseball with the Terre Haute Rex franchise, the opening of downtown hotels, and partnerships between private industry, the city and local colleges to develop new initiatives and preserve historic sites. “I’m just dazzled,” he said, “by a lot of what’s going on right now.”
Right now.
Maybe the snapshots of our lives, taken this year, will make an interesting book eight decades from now.
Mark Bennett can be reached at (812) 231-4377 or mark.bennett@tribstar.com.
