When I moved into this house, these two tiny magnets were stuck to the side of the medicine chest:

I wondered for a moment about where these bow-tied frogs came from, but then got back to moving in. They’re still stuck to the medicine chest.

A few of my YouTube subscriptions regularly deliver vintage cartoons to me. One day, the mystery of the cravatted amphibian was solved when this was posted:

The frog magnets are Hoppity Hooper! In case you can’t make it out in the fuzzy video, here’s a still:

Wait. Who?

I’d never heard of him. And that’s saying something, because I love cartoons and have watched tons of them. Apparently, Hoppity’s the most overlooked creation of Jay Ward, who much more famously created Rocky and Bullwinkle. As a matter of fact, many of the side cartoons from the Rocky and Bullwinkle shows came to Hoppity Hooper’s show, too, including Peabody’s Improbable History, Fractured Fairy Tales, and Mr. Know-It-All.

If I had to guess, I’d say the magnets came out of a box of cereal. I used to have an entire set of similar, but larger, magnets I got from Freakies cereal in 1974. Anyone who was school-aged in 1974 knows what I’m talking about. Too bad I didn’t get my magnets off the fridge before it became my ex-wife’s fridge.

Nearly all of the Michigan Road is (or was at one time) state or US highway and has been improved to modern highway standards. The only notable exception is a 20-mile section that begins about 13 miles north of Madison. It looks like any other Indiana county road. The only concession to modern roadbuilding is that it carries two lanes; the original road was one lane wide.

North of Madison, the Michigan Road becomes US 421, running along the eastern edge of the 56,000-acre Jefferson Proving Ground, a former military installation , most of which today is a national wildlife refuge. Where the JPG’s border veers west, so does the Michigan Road, leaving US 421 behind.

On my Saturday trip along the road, after I turned off US 421 I lifted my camera and shot some video through the windshield.

No matter that this was my second trip along this part of the road and that I knew the bridge was there, seeing the bridge reveal herself as I rounded that curve made me dizzy with pleasure and delight. It went to my head, just as momentarily intoxicating as the scent of lilacs or lavender.

 
This northbound photo from the bridge shows the fence that marks the Jefferson Proving Grounds boundary and the road inside that follows the site’s perimeter.

I took several photos of the bridge. Click on either of these to see them larger and to access the other photos I took on my Flickr pages.

I know of two other 1800s stone bridges left along the Michigan Road. A small one is several miles north of here along this segment. Another is on a brief one-lane segment bypassed a long time ago.

When Indiana was new, most Hoosiers lived along the Ohio River. The state’s first and largest city, Madison, was on the river, and the state’s first capital, Corydon, was near the river. Indiana wasn’t ten years old in 1825 when the capital moved to Indianapolis at the state’s swampy center. People needed ways to get to the new capital city, and so the state built its first major roads. The Madison State Road connected Madison, and the Mauxferry Road connected the Corydon area, to Indianapolis.

But then came the Michigan Road, connecting Madison not only to Indianapolis, but to Lake Michigan as well through lands newly acquired by treaty with the Indians who had lived in northern Indiana. The Michigan Road was complete by the mid 1830s, and people began migrating into the north’s rich, flat farmland.

The original road, which was made of dirt or timbers, fell into disuse during the 1800s railroad boom. But then private interests took over the road, covering it in gravel and charging tolls to travel on it. The rise of the automobile led the state to create a network of good roads, for which it used segments of the Michigan Road. As towns and cities were built and grew to prominence along the Michigan Road, the road became important as a means of traveling between these places, keeping the state from destroying or abandoning much of this road as it built bigger and faster highways. Because this remarkable sequence of events preserved the Michigan Road, you can drive almost all of its original route today.

I am interested in the Michigan Road because I have lived near it for more than 30 of my 40 years, first in South Bend and now in Indianapolis. I learned only a few years ago that Michigan Street in South Bend and Michigan Road in Indianapolis are the same road, and that this road has a rich story and important place in Indiana’s history.

As the warm weather months unfold I will drive the Michigan Road from end to end, about 270 miles. I will write about my experience, tell a little bit about the history of the road and the towns on it, and share photographs from the road today and some I have found from the road’s past.

I started my trip on Saturday, driving north from Madison. This northbound photo is from a twisty uphill segment near where the road begins. Facing south from here, you can see over Madison to the Ohio River.

I’ll write more about the first leg of my Michigan Road journey soon. Meanwhile, if you live on or near the Michigan Road and have stories or images to share, I’d love to hear from you.

Hoosiers, did you get out and vote today? For the first time in my memory, a Presidential primary meant something in Indiana, at least to the Democrats. And do the Democratic candidates know it. They’ve spent enough time here in the past several weeks that news crews statewide have forgotten what their families look like.

I skew conservative and so my vote today was pretty unexciting. I briefly considered crossing the line and filling out a Democrat ballot to vote against Hillary Clinton, but I have a hard time casting even a protest ballot for anyone who wants universal health care. It’s not that I think the current system is fabulous. It’s that I worked for four years for the nation’s largest private health insurer in a division that executed large Medicare contracts. I dealt directly with government workers at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services – fine people for the most part, just like you’d find in any workplace – but was not amused to see how the political pressures they were under shaped their decisions. If that’s how our government manages healthcare, then I never want the government to manage mine.

My parents splurged (at $2.95 a month) on cable in 1972 so Dad could watch his beloved White Sox on Channel 44 from Chicago. This opened up a whole new world of TV entertainment for my brother and I. Ray Rayner on Channel 9 got us off to school every day (”Ten minutes to eight, don’t be late!”) and the Three Stooges and the Little Rascals were waiting for us on Channel 32 when we got home. And Channel 44 had a whole bunch of great cartoons, including many of the Marvel superhero series from the 1960s.

But the best of Channel 44’s cartoons, the one my brother and I went nuts for, was Speed Racer, an early anime about a young race car driver. (You probably haven’t escaped the trailers for the movie, opening this month, based on this show.) Speed Racer had a style and intensity missing in the cartoons that filled our Saturday mornings. We were taken in by the mystery surrounding Racer X, a driver who always arrived at the right moment to give Speed advice or save his bacon, but then disappeared – and Speed didn’t know that Racer X was actually his older brother, Rex, who ran away from home some years before. Nobody at Hanna-Barbera was writing cartoons like this.

This 40-year-old series is available on DVD today, and I own the first volume. A few changes were made to the opening and closing sequences as the films were remastered, so today I share with you what they looked like when I first saw them in the early 1970s.

A few pictures from my walk along Spring Mill Road turned out all right.

I took this northbound photo at 103rd St., which is just beyond the I-465 overpass. I really like how the road ripples where the two cars are on it. The redbud with its purple-pink flowers is common throughout Indiana. There are tons of them along this part of Spring Mill Road.

Hard to believe, but this is considered city, since it’s within the Carmel city limits.

I wanted to stop to take photos at many places as I drove north from here, but Spring Mill Road is narrow and shoulderless, and I wasn’t sure the Carmel police would understand if I parked in the grass alongside some subdivision. This prevented me from getting a photo of a short abandoned segment of Spring Mill Road.

Update 13 May: I found this photo that shows that this segment of Spring Mill Road had already been rerouted in 1958! Look at the bottom edge of the photo.

Orignally, to stay on Spring Mill you had to jog right onto 116th St and then left onto Spring Mill again. The remnant of the original route follows the line of trees in the photo. I’m pretty sure I remember driving this jog a long time ago. The jog was probably fine when this was just a farm road. But as businesses began to locate in Carmel and people figured out they could avoid congested US 31 (the next road to the east) on Spring Mill, it probably got hellaciously congested. First the road curved to avoid this jog, creating a 4-way stop. Then a year or so ago roundabout-happy Carmel built a roundabout here. The aerial image is from before the roundabout, but the Google Maps label overlay shows it. I used to think that Carmel built roundabouts because they didn’t have enough to do with all their money, but now that I drive up here all the time I find that these things really do keep traffic flowing better.

Sorry, enough roadgeekery, back to the flowers. A couple miles north of 103rd St., in the 12600s, the road is lined with what I think are ornamental cherry trees. Their white flowers create real drama along the side of the road.

These trees’ powerful scent filled the air. I liked how the one in the photo below reaches the ground, just spilling over.

I wished I had time to take more photos, but I was sort of playing hooky as it was. So back to work I went.

I feel fortunate to have a really pleasant drive to work for the first time since moving to Indianapolis many years ago. From my Northwestside home I can take any number of routes along surface streets north out of the city. These are the old suburbs, filled with low ranch houses set well back from the street behind tall maples and oaks. Even at rush hour I can drive at least the speed limit.

Spring Mill Road was first cut through the central Indiana countryside at least 150 years, based on old maps I’ve seen. The road was straight then and surely a real adventure in a few places where the terrain was rugged (by Indiana standards). Today, the road is curved to avoid them, but this has made for treacherous driving on snowy and icy days. But on a day like today, when the sun is out and the trees and flowers are in bloom along the route, I make my drive to Carmel, the city where I work, on Spring Mill Road all the way.

96th St is the gateway into Hamilton County. It wasn’t very long ago that southern Hamilton County was all farmland, but today most of the land is covered in luxury subdivisions and has been annexed by Carmel. Still, driving Spring Mill Road in Hamilton County feels plenty rural. The few remaining farms set the mood, and the subdivisions are all set way back and generally kept behind stone fences with plenty of trees planted near the road. I’ve watched any number of deer cross the road ahead of me, and have even had to stop hard once or twice. Only the roundabouts at each intersection remind you that you’re still in civilization.

Along Spring Mill Road this week the trees have been in full bloom, purples and pinks and pale greens and whites. For long stretches, it’s like driving through a tunnel of color. Yesterday I took a late lunch, hoping traffic would be low, and went out with my camera to try to capture the beauty. I failed! I may post a couple of those photos later this week so you can see, but they don’t show the full experience of enjoying the colors as they go by. But I noticed one thing while out on the road’s shoulders that eluded me at 40 mph – the scents. The section of Spring Mill Road nearest my work is lined with what are probably cherry trees with their white blossoms. As I stood at the road’s edge taking photographs, I could not escape those blooms’ scent. They filled my nostrils with every breath, making me a little dizzy. I have never experienced something like it before.

What’s been your best springtime experience so far?

This being my first spring in this house, I wondered what surprises the yard would bring as it came back to life. My neighbor tells me that the couple who built this house did some landscaping about ten years ago. After they both passed away, the property became a rental and was only minimally maintained. The grass is half weeds and bare spots.

The beds appeared to be in slightly better shape, at least until the dandelions started to fill them. A few weeks ago, green evidence of bulb plants started to push through the ground in the biggest bed, ten steps into the yard from my front door.

They started blooming last week, the narcissus first, white and then yellow. The tulips came next, the red a few days before the purple. I don’t recall ever having seen purple tulips before, but I haven’t historically been terribly observant of such things. I liked tulips as a young boy because they were easy to draw.

I will probably plant some annuals around the edges of this bed in a few weeks. But I sure love these bulb plants, an annual gift from my home’s original owner.

A lot of these little blue-violet flowers have come up in clumps in this bed, too. I like how their petals are all different lengths. I have no idea what these flowers are, so tell me if you know.

Click any of these photos to see them slightly larger.

The anti-establishmentarian in blogger Hoosier Reborn questioned the church trend of creating community. I wanted to expand on a comment I left on his post.

North Liberty Christian Church was founded in Marion County, Indiana, in 1839. I’m told it’s the third oldest church in what is now Indianapolis. I found this 1855 plat map at the Indiana University/Purdue University Indianapolis Digital Collection that shows the church, which I’ve marked on the map below. Click the map to see it larger.

The church was surrounded by farms for miles. Indianapolis was nine miles away along the Lafayette Road, the diagonal road on the map just east of the church. Lafayette Road is still there. It carried US 52 during most of the 20th century, and today is a heavily traveled four-lane city street. But in 1855, Lafayette Road was certainly no more than a dirt wagon trail. By horse, a man could ride to town in a couple hours – unless it had rained or snowed, in which case the road was impassable. So these farm families spent most of their lives around their land. In tough times, these families could turn only to each other. For this reason, I’m sure they built community. That they built churches like North Liberty Christian Church and worshiped together reflected the community they naturally built among themselves. Evidence of their community remains – the names on the map above are on the headstones in the church’s cemetery. If you click this 1937 aerial photograph of the region, which I got at the City of Indianapolis’s Indianapolis General Data Viewer, you will see in greater detail not only the cemetery, but also that the church was still surrounded by farms even 71 years ago.

As late as the early 1960s the area was overwhelmingly agrigultural, even though Interstate highways were built less than a mile from the church to its east and west, and a couple farmers sold out and early suburban neighborhoods were built on the land. I’m sure the same farm families were working the remaining soil. It would take more research than I can do with online maps to know how the church had changed by this time. I feel sure, though, that these same farm families still formed the core community of North Liberty Christian Church in 1973, when it had added enough members from elsewhere that they needed to double the size of their building.

You probably guessed that the remaining farmers sold out over the next thirty years. When I first came to North Liberty Christian Church a few years ago, here’s what the area looked like, also from the Indianapolis General Data Viewer. Click the image to see it larger.

The farmers are gone from the land and the church. The names on the headstones are just quaint history to all but a handful of longtime members. And what do you think happened to the church community? Many of us choose our churches today because of doctrine or comfort or the programs they offer, and we change churches as our needs change. Most of a congregation’s families don’t see each other except on Sunday. Our lives aren’t centered around place as they were 170 years ago. We don’t have to depend on our neighbors anymore. What created community in 1839 doesn’t exist today.

I don’t think Hoosier Reborn turns his nose up at community – rather, he decries trying to force community within the modern church because it can ultimately separate us from others. I think a hidden point there is that we can’t be the light of the world if we’re in community only with our church.

Our modern mobility, wealth, and independence have let us rely less on our neighbor. I’m a poster child for that. I live alone for the most part. I make enough to own a nice but modest small home in Indianapolis. I have good health care, mostly paid for by insurance, and so illness is not much of a worry. I drive 10 miles each way to and from work every day, where I spend eight hours with people I never see otherwise because they all live elsewhere. I have met two of my neighbors but have never had a conversation with them. I’ve never even seen whoever lives next door to my south! I have friends at work, friends at church, friends from college, and friends from other times in my life. Some of them met each other last year when they helped me move into this house, but otherwise their circles don’t overlap.

Yet I still need connection. So do you. This hasn’t changed since 1839. I have put together my family of sorts from the people I’ve encountered along the way, and we do what community does – encourage each other, whack each other upside the head when we need it, and help out with things we can’t do by ourselves (such as move into my new house).

So then what should the church’s role be in community, given that its backbone role has evolved away? Please share your thoughts.

As a slobbering Paul McCartney fan I bought his most recent CD, Memory Almost Full, the day of its release last year. I even ponied up extra for the two-disc special edition with bonus songs and commentary, in which Paul said he often writes songs around a lick and a phrase with no particular meaning in mind. He said it delights him when people explain to him what his songs mean when he doesn’t even know himself!

My young sons dig the Band on the Run CD. When I play it in the car, before long all three of us are singing along. I first heard the album through in the mid 1980s and took a fancy to “Mamunia,” the first song on side two. I played it on my college radio shows often enough that I got to know every scratchy noise on the station’s well-used record. But only recently did this song have a meaning for me. To me, the song is about what James said: “Consider it pure joy, my brothers, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith develops perseverance. Perseverance must finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.”

The rain comes falling from the sky,
To fill the stream that fills the sea
And that’s where life began for you and me

Rain brings life.

So the next time you see rain it ain’t bad,
Don’t complain it rains for you,
The next time you see L.A. rainclouds,
Don’t complain it rains for you and me.

Life will rain on you sometimes. Accept the rain; it’s meant for you!

It might have been a bright blue day
But rainclouds had to come this way
They’re watering everything that they can see.

You never know when it will rain on you.

A seed is waiting in the earth
For rain to come and give him birth
It’s all he really needs to set him free,
So the next time you see L.A. rainclouds
Don’t complain, it rains for you.

Without rain – the challenges and difficulties you face – you can’t break free and grow to maturity.

So lay down your umbrellas
Strip off your plastic macs.
You’ve never felt the rain my friend,
Till you’ve felt it running down your back.

Have you ever played in the rain and enjoyed letting it soak you? When difficulties come your way, put down your defenses and face them with joy!

So the next time you see rain, it ain’t bad
Don’t complain, it rains for you.
The next time you see L.A. rainclouds
Don’t complain it rains for you and me.

And in this way, rain brings life! What joy there is in growth!

Let it rain!

I found this clip on YouTube of backing vocal harmonies from the song.