Familiar Faces -- The People and Places of Indiana’s 93rd County

Familiar Faces The People and Places of Indiana’s 93rd County

by Mark S. Schlachter

Familiar Faces The People and Places of Indiana’s 93rd County

The Hoosier Anomaly: is it fact or phantasy?

The Author Teacher, photographer, theatre designer, broadcaster, librarian, writer, and sculptor all describe Cincinnati native Mark Schlachter. A graduate of Oak Hills High School, Morehead

Seldom mentioned in conversation and never

State University, and Indiana University,

shown on any mainstream map or atlas, the

Schlachter has spent his adult life finding ways

Hoosier Anomaly is phantasy, as convention

to make all of his interests work together.

and common sense dictate. But there is so much substance to this will-o-the-wisp. There are the stories, and the pictures—dozens of them—traditionally produced photographs showing no trace of Photoshop, all urging us to say this is fact. This is real.

Familiar Faces is unique. It stands as the lone historical record of Ersatz County, Indiana’s, ignored and largely forgotten ninety-third

For four years listeners of WNOP-Realjazz 740 kept informed of the idiosyncrasies of Ersatz County, Indiana, the Ersatz & Moot Point Railway, Smiley Brothers Mortuary Mall, and the Rip Track Café through the combined efforts of Schlachter and his alter ego WNOP general manager, Mark Stevens.

Schlachter remains a resident of Cincinnati’s west side. He is married to Rosemary, who

county. Ersatz County and Grindle, its equally

appreciates the symphony and other arts.

obscure seat of government, are home to

Their family includes daughter Abby, a

not just square pegs, but more than a few

graduate of Northern Kentucky University, her

triangular ones that gave up trying to fit in

husband Jason and their children; son Brody

round holes years ago. Where else could a

and daughter Kalli; son Kurt, a graduate of

Roman Catholic priest who celebrates mass

Indiana University now living in New York

in Hebrew, a retired schoolteacher who has walked to the moon, and a former madam, now a successful Realtor, revel in the comfort of their diversity?

Familiar Faces can be considered nothing less than authentic ersatz history.

In the stage production of J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, the audience is urged to save the poisoned fairy Tinkerbell by clapping their hands to prove belief in fairies. An evening spent with Familiar Faces and the people of Ersatz County is sure to leave you clapping.

with wife Sandra and daughter Lilah; son Kameron, a music editor and engraver; and son Max, a University of Cincinnati industrial design graduate who views his family as a benign odd lot.

Familiar Faces

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Familiar Faces The People and Places of Indiana’s 93rd County

by Mark S. Schlachter

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Familiar Faces The People and Places of Indiana’s 93rd County Copyright © 2019 by Mark S. Schlachter All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, digital, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from Mark S. Schlachter, Cincinnati, Ohio.

ISBN 978-1-5323-3923-3 Mark S. Schlachter 2335 Beechcreek Lane Cincinnati, Ohio 45233 Author and Photographer Mark S. Schlachter

Book Development Bookhouse Group, Inc. www.bookhouse.net Editorial Director Rob Levin Design Rick Korab Production Director Renée Peyton Printed in the United States of America

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C O N T E N T S Foreword | IX | PA R T I | 1 | Ersatz County, Indiana The First 100 Years | 2 | Ersatz County, Indiana The Second Century | 13 | Dutch Treat | 2 2 | The Great Switchback | 24 | Necessity Begets Ingenuity | 26 | The Incident Inn | 2 8 | The Chief | 30 | The Smiley Brothers | 32 | Grindle Patriot | 34 | The Lady Conductor | 36 | Casey Callahan | 38 | Crummy Kid | 40 | Designing Woman | 4 2 | Wrench Wench | 4 4 | Dennis Dillbeck | 46 | Two Bobbits | 4 8 |

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P A R T I I | 51 |

PA R T I I I | 83 |

The Blizzard of ’18 | 52 |

Now Ewe Know | 84 |

The Dames | 56 |

The Collector | 8 8 |

The Leader of the Flock | 58 |

Charmaine | 9 0 |

Brother Earnest | 60 |

Butch Remle | 92 |

The Three Ersatz Bs | 62 |

The Sand Patch | 9 4 |

Conscience of a Community | 64 |

The Rip Track | 9 6 |

Pumpboy | 66 |

Tommy Snell | 98 |

A Legend | 6 8 |

Buster Fletcher | 10 0 |

Elmer and Heather | 70 |

Davinci | 102 |

The Planning Commission | 72 |

Grindle Exotica | 10 4 |

Dreamer | 74 |

Scholarly Assessment | 106 |

Jawn Henry | 76 |

Smell of Success | 10 8 |

Bass Hit | 78 |

RT 129...Formerly | 110 |

Madam Walker | 80 |

The Queen | 112 | Four Putt | 114 | The Projectionist | 116 | Deaf Boy Dugan | 118 | Ms Redneck | 12 0 | Sharing the Blame | 122 |

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Foreword Some of America’s favorite and most famous towns receive the fewest visitors. Grover’s Mill, New Jersey, is infamous as the site of an alien invasion in October 1938. Grover’s Corner is Our Town, home of Doc Gibbs, George Gibbs, Editor Webb, and daughter Emily. Hill Valley, California, is known internationally as the birthplace of DeLorean time travel. Every English major knows well the residents of Winesburg, Ohio, every music major is part citizen of River City, Iowa, and who can dismiss the presence of Lake Wobegon, Minnesota?

We know these places and people so well, and yet we never make them our road trip destination. Perhaps it is contempt based on familiarity. We feel we have been there. We have done that.

I spent three early 1960s summers in northwest Indiana. As a curious buckeye, I listened to the stories my hoosier summer friends told. Some were more than a little off kilter. They were odd in the best possible way, and they stuck with me.

Years later I returned to the region of my high school summer residence, and found the reality behind those apparently apocryphal stories. I discovered Indiana’s ninety-third county and then assigned myself the task of pulling it out of the shadows of history and into the half-light of current neglect.

Decades of research and hundreds of hours taking photographs and printing images are now joined in the most complete documentation yet of the people and places of Indiana’s Ersatz County.

This fauxtodocumentary can never be complete, but it will serve us well, for as a scholar at the big university in Bloomington said, “If Schlachter had done less, it would have been more than enough. It is what it is.”

Fitting words to describe a community neck deep in self-deprecation.

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PA R T I

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Ersatz County, Indiana The First 100 Years According to the esteemed Rindsberg’s Survey of Obscure Hoosier Triviata, the phenomena known as the Hoosier Anomaly is defined as: “The academic euphemism applied to the area comprising Ersatz County, Indiana. A compact area of hills, rock outcrops, and rushing waterways, it is surrounded on all sides by the gently rolling land typical of northern Indiana, Ohio, and Illinois. It is a geological phenomenon unexplained by scientists and its existence is considered embarrassing to them. Discussion of the Hoosier Anomaly is discouraged in the geology departments of all major universities and cartographers have regarded the area with blind eyes for more than a century.”

On a crisp October day in 1799, eighteen weary wanderers stood in a clearing and assessed their situation.

Though the day was postcard perfect, it was not a day of joy for the travelers. This band had been pushing through the great western wilderness of their young nation for more than six months and now, like it or not, they had reached their destination.

They knew not where they were, but all agreed that this was the end of the journey, for the wheels had quite literally fallen off their wagon and there was no way to push further.

The eighteen were what could only be described as an odd lot, and included a brewer, a toymaker, an Amish, an ironmonger, a tinkerer, a witch, a strangely silent boy, and a con. All born and raised in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, these friends, by necessity, had but one thing in common: They were to a man, woman, and child, square pegs in the round hole of Bucks County.

Over a period of years, just as the black jelly beans in a jar seem to gather in the same corner, this curious group gradually had found each other and formed a sort of informal association of the different. The brewer could not understand the local preference for hard cider rather than to a fine product of malt, hops, and barley. The toymaker was universally viewed as superfluous since he made nothing of practical value. The Amish had bought a whale oil lamp for his home and was considered immodestly progressive by his neighbors. The ironmonger had a penchant for creating odd appliances which he described as, “Of beneficial value to enduring intimate relationship of husband and wife.” The town folk simply saw them as

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cuffs, shackles, and other devices of restraint and constraint. The tinkerer, who was a tinker by trade, was head over heels with every new gimcrack that made its way to town and talked of a day when carriages would not require horses and there would be no need to leave the warmth of the house to make use of the accommodation. The witch was merely a witch and although Bucks County, Pennsylvania, is far from Salem, Massachusetts . . . well, a witch is, after all, a witch. The silent boy could talk, but rarely did. When badgered about not speaking and asked when he would, he had once replied, “When I can improve on the silence.”

Finally, there was the con. He was friendly, intelligent, imaginative, confident, charismatic, and ready with a solution for any problem. His solutions invariably placed him in a roll of importance, of leadership and in the pay of those he had convinced to place him in charge.

The con was Worthy Grindle. A raconteur, and allegedly an educated man, a self-proclaimed veteran of the recent revolution, a surveyor/cartographer, and explorer, Worthy had convinced the group that they were never going to be accepted nor comfortable in Doylestown and that the solution was to travel west into the vast, mysterious Ohio country. Grindle displayed a map showing an ideal destination near present day Waynesville, Ohio, and the wisp of a dream began to coalesce. The winter of 1798-1799 found this mélange of humanity quietly at work making plans for their great traverse. They were careful not to share any part of the scheme with their neighbors, thus avoiding further eye-rolling, derision, and ridicule. On the first day of April, a date even then known as Fool’s Day, the eighteen left Doylestown and headed west.

Today, this trip of 500 miles plus pocket change would entail little more than eight hours. The travelers expected to complete the journey in slightly more than 60 days. At the time of the wagon’s demise they had been in transit more than 190 days and even the witch felt like a part of the mass of Israelites fleeing Egypt and spending decades in the wilderness.

We now know that they had wandered from Pennsylvania through Virginia, touched upon present-day Kentucky, Ohio, and ended up not near Waynesville or Harveysburg, but somewhere north of Peru and east of South Bend in what was to soon become Indiana.

Worthy Grindle made no apologies for the extended journey and none in the group had bothered to do the math showing that Worthy Grindle would have been a mere gleam in his parents’ eyes when he was allegedly serving as an aide to George Washington in his early surveying of the western lands, and would have been a toddler during the War for Independence.

The next few days found the eighteen assessing their situation and formulating a plan for the future. Their supplies were terribly short; it was far too late in the year to plant and harvest; winter was approaching and shelter was lacking.

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Klaus Pringle, the toymaker spent more than a day fashioning a crude doll’s house from the wood and bark of a fallen poplar. At first this effort was seen with displeasure by the others. It was a waste of time at a time when their lives were on the line. Soon however the group realized that Pringle’s doll house was a fine design for a simple lodging and within a week a tiny subdivision was under construction. Two centuries later architectural historians would consider this rude compound the inspiration for the groundbreaking concept of Levittown, Pennsylvania.

While shelter was soon crossed off the list of immediate needs, the reality of facing a cold winter without provisions loomed ever larger and more frightening.

This time the witch found the solution. While gathering herbs and medicinal mushrooms, Grettle Koetler was startled by a bronze-skinned man in deerskin leggings doing the same. Amazingly this native of the area showed neither fear nor aggression and spoke excellent English. Grettle had stumbled upon Chief Mellow Fellow (a rough translation of his tribal name), the chief of the Moxitoxic people. The Moxitoxic, he explained, were peaceful, enjoyed the pleasures of the area’s plentiful and potent medicinal mushrooms and had spent long days and nights with both French and English explorers, military, and trappers. The result—a tribe of polyglots who liked nothing better than a basket of mushrooms and a cohort of friends.

With shelter in progress and salvation from starvation guaranteed by the charitable Moxitoxic, the Doylestown eighteen began to relax, explore, and figure out just where in the world they were. The silent boy succinctly stated, “We’re not in Ohio anymore.” If he had been a bit more generous with words, he might have added that they weren’t in Pennsylvania, Virginia, or Kentucky anymore either.

Much of the final month or so of their long journey had been across gently rolling land. The horizon was far behind and in the distance ahead. There had been no shear rock faces nor streams with roaring rapids. They had traveled with relative ease until the moment of the mechanically imposed termination. Now, as they took stock of the land about them they found that the terrain was as out of place as they were themselves. For nearly a full day’s journey by foot in any direction they were faced with significant hills, rivers, and streams that rushed rather than meandered. In one particularly odd area, a nearly rectangular plot seemed almost consciously carved out of the bare limestone and filled as deep as they could dig, with clean sand.

There was one final curiosity. In a large treeless area, the Amish and the tinker found a massive earthworks.

By climbing a tree at the crest of the nearest hill the men could see that this was not a mere mound. It was the well-defined likeness of a giant salamander.

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The first winter was passed in peace and relative comfort and the eighteen began to think of their destination by default as home. Dreams were dreamt of farming, brewing, smithing, tinkering, and governing. The silent young man moved out of the settlement—too much noise—and built his own cabin on a spit of land projecting into the northern edge of the large nearby lake. On a long January afternoon, made mellow with Moxitoxic mushrooms and herbal supplements, one of the participants referred to the silent young man’s retreat as Mute Point. Later, when heads were clearer, someone noted the silent resident was not mute . . . merely silent. Grindle replied that the point was moot.

The name stuck.

On December 11, 1816, Indiana was officially named the nineteenth state of the Union. By this time the Doylestown eighteen knew that they were not in Ohio, but in the Indiana territory. They had built a small energetic community, which they had named Grindle, at the urging of none other than Worthy Grindle.

Worthy, who had never been faulted for self-modesty, based his campaign for recognition on the premise that his vision and leadership brought them to this spot and those virtues deserved acknowledgement.

The proposal had been made on another long afternoon made mellow through a combination of mushrooms and the now popular ale produced by August Schexnaydor, the brewer. There were no alternative names floated; there were no strong opinions either yea or nay and acceptance seemed easier than soliciting, discussing, eliminating, and eventually adopting what could be done immediately with no muss, fuss, or bother.

The town would be Grindle. The name stuck.

The new state of Indiana was a political blank slate. Structure, policies, and procedures for governance were lacking, required, and urgently needed. An assembly was called at the new Capital in Corydon and delegations from throughout the state made their way to the seat of government to define the future. Not surprisingly, Worthy Grindle represented what was now Grindle, Indiana, and he chose as his second, the silent young man. Some in town thought the choice of the silent one as a delegate odd. Worthy thought it a stroke of genius. This associate would not interfere with his goals and plans, would not publicly question his stories of service in the Revolution, exploration with President Washington, gifts as a scholar or skills as a leader. The resident of Moot Point was the ideal foil for Worthy Grindle. Spirits were a major part of frontier life, especially frontier political life. Endless and often contentious meetings may have filled the days, but the real work with real results occurred in taverns at night. Many decisions were made over a pint or two . . . or three; others were the result of generous rounds of raw corn spirits, freshly distilled and consumed un-aged.

Still others depended on the roll of dice, the toss of a coin, or the lucky draw of a card.

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Worthy Grindle was no teetotaler. He was, in fact, a prodigious consumer of Schexnaydor’s superior brews. He was, however, unaccustomed to the potent products of the region’s very active stills. Today Corydon is known for its popcorn. In 1816 Corydon’s corn crop had a very different intention. After three days of seemingly endless meetings and three nights of liver-destroying revelry, Grindle was incapacitated. The duties of official delegate would have to be borne by the silent young man.

The fourth day of the convention was deemed the proper time to divide the state’s regions into governable counties. This had been foreseen by all of the delegates and each had arrived with two or three favored names to be officially considered for application to the home district. Grindle had expected this and had lobbied for the job of delegate in order to propose his own name as that for the new county. Grindle’s intention may have been known, or at least anticipated by the silent young man, but it was something . . . one more thing . . . he never discussed. One by one, ninety-two delegates rose and solemnly stated the name proposed for their home districts. Ninety-two times the Speaker swung his gavel and announced the name of the new county.

Marion, Franklin, Ripley, Jennings, Brown, Bartholomew, each had its brief moment of glory, until it was time for the ninety-third. The silent young man stood, looked around, took a deep breath and released, what for him, was a torrent. “Gentlemen and honorable delegates, I am not a delegate such as yourselves. I am a substitute, a mere imitation . . . an ersatz delegate who feels unworthy to speak for the incommoded worthy gentleman assigned this serious task.”

Breathless and shaking from the unaccustomed burden of public discourse, the young man took his seat and waited. The Speaker, seeing the chance to finally add some levity to what had been a humorless series of proceedings announced, “As we have an ersatz delegate, we find that he is the delegate of Ersatz. The ninetythird county of the state of Indiana shall be Ersatz County.”

The gavel swung. The deed was done. The name stuck.

As Worthy Grindle came out of his stupor, he was dimly aware of laughter in the tavern room below his bedchamber. Struggling to his feet he staggered to join the crowd and learn the cause for the merriment. In short order he learned he had missed the entire naming ceremony, and that his second had failed to enter Grindle’s name . . . or any other. He learned that he was now the representative of Ersatz County, the butt of a joke, and the resident of a Hoosier laughing stock.

The news drove Grindle back to drink, and the drink along with the humiliation of representing an . . . no . . . the Ersatz County kept him from attending any further sessions of the convention.

On the long trek home, Grindle’s bleary eyes gradually sharpened and he became aware of a faint smile on

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the lips of the silent young man. Grindle was a changed man. He made the trip in a silence as deep as his companion’s, and by the time they entered Ersatz County he was morose and broken. He made no statement, no proclamation, and no boasts of his accomplishments in the capital. He passed directly to his lodging and remained withdrawn and alone.

The silent young man was changed as well. He was smiling, and to the wonder of all, was eager to share his impressions of the legislative process. Within days he had moved from Moot Point to a room above the tavern. By month’s end, he had become a social animal and was courting tinker Roy’s elder daughter, becoming by spring, part of the town council.

The news of the Constitutional Assembly was of limited interest to the residents of Grindle, Indiana. They were still an odd lot living in an odd section of the new state. Life was a fulltime proposition and that meant available energy and resources were devoted to the needs of the growing community.

Nearly all of the original Doylestown eighteen were raising children conceived and born in Grindle. Roy Lee Roy, the tinker, had, besides his daughters, a son, also Roy Lee Roy; Klaus Pringle was happily making toys for Hans and Gretchen Pringle; Amos Yoder was beginning to get help with the chores, thanks to Rebecca, Rachel, Sarah, Micah, and Moses Yoder; and Goldsmith, the blacksmith, had fashioned a tiny pair of manacles and leg irons as Christmas gifts for his firstborn. The Schexnaydors were expecting, and a crib fashioned from a mash tub was ready for the new arrival.

There were others swelling the town rolls as well. Additional Amish arrived. Hostetlers, Millers, and the occasional Coblenz joined with the original Yoder clan. Bunt, the baker, appeared and the strangely fastidious Dillbeck, though disheartened by the general disorder of what he found, remained.

Dillbeck had heard rumors of Pleasant Plain, a community unlike any other in the new territories. In an age of make-do and rough and tumble, Pleasant Plain was clean, orderly, painted . . . a refuge for the anal retentive, the holy grail of the obsessive compulsive. Unfortunately, while crossing through Ersatz County, Dillbeck’s horse pulled up lame and his wife had contracted a fever. While Grettel Koetler, the witch, provided a potion to deal with the fever, the horse was a lost cause. Much like the original settlers, he had to acknowledge Grindle as the end of the line. And like the original eighteen, Dillbeck was a square peg who soon managed to fit in nicely.

Through all of this the Moxitoxic smiled. Mellow Fellow and his wife, Lame Deer Dancing, were thrilled. They and their people were thriving financially. Mushrooms were the ideal cash crop—no sewing or weeding, no thrashing or milling—just simple gathering and sales. They also learned and loved the white man’s games, especially their games of chance.

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In 1847 now-elderly Roy Lee Roy Senior’s Doylestown era prediction came true in Ersatz County. The aged Roy designed and constructed Indiana’s first steam passenger railway and people could travel in carriages not pulled by horses. At first the railway was a mere amusement, carrying the curious a scant nine miles from the edge of Grindle to the nose of the great salamander mound, but the younger Roy had a wider vision.

Within a decade, a web of rails connected Grindle and Ersatz County to Logansport, Royal Center, Beatrice, Outfall, Dithering, and eventually Snit and Splunge. A golden age was at hand.

Pringle, the toymaker, had long been fascinated by pinwheels, and son Hans Pringle had developed the toy into the very practical windmill. With minimal investment, and no operating cost, the most remote farm could have water pumped for animal troughs, irrigation or household use twenty-four hours a day, with no physical effort. Soon the toy factory was expanded and renamed Pringle’s Windworks.

The Roy’s railroad, now identified as the Ersatz & Moot Point Railway Company enjoyed annually better bottom lines as they shipped ever-larger quantities of raw materials to the windworks and growing quantities of finished windmills out of Grindle to water the surrounding states. As commercial travelers came to solicit trade, passenger revenues increased as well.

Schexnaydor and family also turned their eyes beyond the Ersatz County line. The Schexnaydors viewed their brews as something close to a religious experience and one that should be taken to the four corners of the world, or at least the four corners of the state. Private box cars were purchased and lettered with the legend “Schexnaydor—More than a beer . . . a reason for life!”

While thirsty men in Indianapolis, Connersville, Terre Haute, and Elkhart smiled at the rich foamy head and savored the creamy, smooth body of tall mugs of Schexnaydor lagers and ales, bookkeepers at the Ersatz & Moot Point smiled approvingly at ever-growing income streams generated by incoming shipments of grains and departing liquid pleasure.

Goldsmith, the blacksmith, though long-retired from the forge, shared in the industrial good times. Sam and Margaret, Goldsmith’s children, had grown the business. The farrier’s trade was a tiny part of their commercial mix. Goldsmith the elder’s fine manacles, cuffs, chains and other exotic paraphernalia had gained notoriety.

Orders came from Chicago, Memphis, New Orleans, New York, and the mysterious San Francisco. Soon the product line grew from domestic to include commercial and industrial offerings. Some of the nation’s largest cities and most imposing penal facilities employed shackles, cuffs, leg irons, and jail cells proudly crafted by Grindle’s S&M Iron Works. John Roebling specified S&M Iron Works chain to be used in the construction of Cincinnati’s suspension bridge and later the famed Brooklyn Bridge. All of this heavy product left Grindle in

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freight cars and flat cars on the Ersatz & Moot Point, and the railway’s auditors were pleased with the results.

Life was good in Ersatz County and the future seemed bright. The final years of the fifth decade brought rumblings of unrest, but it took a lot to disturb the calm and contentment resulting from a good baked Amish chicken dinner with mushroom enhanced dressing. That was about to change.

January of 1861 brought news to Grindle of the secession of the South from the Union. At first this meant little to the Ersatzians. Northern Indiana was far removed from the Ohio River dividing line and few knew or cared what secession meant to the average man on the average day.

After the attack on Fort Sumter, things changed. Even Grindlites became engaged. A volunteer regiment, the Hoosier 18th, was formed and a camp for the young enlistees was set up along the tail of the Great Salamander Mound. The S&M Iron Works was soon converted to war production. Their exotic bedchamber line was dropped for the duration. To be totally accurate, the exotic line was largely dropped. It seems one very highly placed member of the Union’s War Department had a particular fondness for several S&M products and claimed them vital to national security.

The Yoders smelled opportunity. They formed an association with the other Ersatz Amish and began war production of their own. While their religion prevented them from taking up arms in the conflict, it had no prohibitions to making a profit from it.

While enlisted men subsisted on fritters, salt pork and provisions commandeered from the locals, the officer corps was frequently treated to Amish chicken, Amish cheeses, and occasionally Amish baked goods.

Decades before, Worthy Grindle’s withdrawal from Ersatz County society and politics left a vacuum soon filled by the most unlikely of candidates, Deuteronomy Murphy, the silent young man. When his first name was finally made public, his long silence was understood. Murphy soon adopted the nick name Dutch, eventually making it his legal appellation.

Dutch Murphy was a born politician and had innate ability at working, and gaming, the system.

As the great war ground on, Grindle took its responsibilities to the nation seriously. The Hoosier 18th boarded a special three-coach troop train and shipped out to Koontz Lake, a mere five miles distant. There they were assigned to a gun boat patrolling the lake’s nine and one-half mile shoreline. It was never clear what potential danger threatened Koontz Lake, but the brave boys of the Hoosier 18th served faithfully and vigilantly through the entire war, were recognized for bravery in the face of a rabid raccoon, and upon their return regaled the Ersatz County homefolks with stories of life at the front.

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The troop assignment was due to the clever, imaginative, and effective political manipulation of Dutch Murphy Jr., now serving as Representative Murphy in the congress of the United States. He not only kept the Ersatz boys safe and close to home, he had arranged a lucrative contract for the Yoder and Coblenz boys to build the gunboat, a job completed in a single day in what was recorded as the nation’s first boat-raising.

S&M Iron Works received a share, too, supplying armament and miscellaneous iron fixtures for the vessel.

Even Pringle Windworks got a piece of the action with their design and installation of the windmill-powered propulsion system. The crowning achievement was the ship’s eventual christening as the USS Dutch Treat.

The war finally ended and Ersatz County was briefly jubilant. Then news came of President Lincoln’s assassination and the good people of Grindle attempted to ease their grief by creating some civic statement of respect. A citizens’ committee lead by Roy Lee Roy Jr. created a concept and codified a plan. The Ersatz & Moot Point Railway would clean and repaint a locomotive and first-class coach. The Coblenz brothers would craft Amish furniture for the interior; the Yoders would supply cheeses, chickens, pies, cakes, breads, and buttermilk; the Goldsmiths cast a life-sized representation of Lincoln’s dog, Fido; Schexnaydor would brew a special Honest Abe’s Ale; and Pringle fabricated an animated diorama featuring six Union soldiers saluting a portrait of the fallen president, powered by a small windmill mounted on the train car’s roof. Representative Murphy would prepare and deliver an oration.

In short order all the components were assembled and Roy, Goldsmith, Coblenz, Pringle, Yoder, Schexnaydor, and Murphy boarded the solemn train and left for Springfield.

There was but one problem. Lincoln’s burial was to be in Springfield, Illinois, the place he had last seen steadfast Fido. Due to a misunderstanding, assistant dispatcher Grady Glover had prepared orders routing the train to Springfield, Missouri. The mistake was discovered only after they had reached their destination, a town struggling to recover from years of hardship and bloodshed. Lincoln was not a popular man in Springfield, Missouri, and the Grindle delegation made a hasty retreat.

The Yoder’s ample provisions along with Schexnaydor’s peerless brew made the return trip a surprisingly pleasant experience, and one of the chairs crafted by the Coblenz brothers was judged an excellent design for use outdoors or on a porch. It served as inspiration for the first Amish deck furniture.

The turmoil was over and in Ersatz County life returned to normal. It was a mellow time. The Schexnaydors continued to provide the entire state with their proud product. Sam and Maggie Goldsmith quickly restarted production of the S&M line of intimate domestic offerings filling the pent-up demand created by four years’ suspension of manufacture. The Ersatz & Moot Point was busy, and the Amish experimented with some early marketing, displaying a sign in Old English reading, “If We Weren’t Amish, We’d Yodel for Yoder . . . but You

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Can.” It was a bold and valiant attempt with little effect, and it would be more than a century before another company with an Amish heritage would hit the mark with the now-classic, “With a name like Smucker’s, it has to be good.”

The next decades found the United States invested in reconstruction, the construction and triumphant completion of the transcontinental railroad, amazing engineering feats, and a major federal program constructing lighthouses along all of our seacoast.

Representative Dutch Murphy Jr. knew an opportunity when he saw it, but puzzled how to use it to his advantage. Money was being poured into projects in isolated spots from Florida to Maine and California to Washington. Louisiana and Texas had lighthouses, and Murphy knew in his Ersatz heart of hearts that Indiana deserved one, too. Finally, over a last snifter of brandy in Washington’s posh Willard Hotel, inspiration came.

Murphy would propose a lighthouse to protect the shoals of Moot Point on Ersatz County’s only significant body of water, Koontz Lake. The lighthouse was needed to protect the area’s waterborne commerce and encourage expansion of “lake trade.”

The concept was a magnificent sham. Worthy Grindle, the original con, would have been proud. The only waterborne commerce on Lake Koontz was the traditional shipment by Moxitoxic canoe of baskets of mushrooms for market at the Grindle Mercantile. Lake trade was a term that would not be used again for nearly a century when it would refer to the summer people in cottages ringing the lake.

Sham or not, the proposal succeeded. Bundled with a bill appropriating $178,00 for the Currituck light, $140,000 for the Bodie Island light, and an additional $80,000 for the Cape Hatteras light, all in North Carolina, Murphy’s Moot Point light got a respectable $160,000.

Construction began in 1875 and completion was expected in 1877. Like the best of federally funded projects, unforeseen complications took a toll. By the time the Moot Point Light was dedicated July 18, 1887, the cost had risen to $300,000 and the light itself stood at a height of 187 feet instead of the originally intended 60.

Dutch Murphy Jr. made his final public appearance at the dedication. He extolled the beauty, utility, and economic assets of the towering light. He was resolute that the Moot Point light would make the public safer and provide a beacon of hope for future generations.

That night the light with its first order rotating Fresnel lens was lit for the last time. Every thirty-seven seconds the knife of white light would cut the darkness. Seven miles away Murphy retired for the night. Every thirty-

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seven seconds the master bedroom of stately Murphy Manor was set ablaze by the Moot Point beacon.

Murphy finally fled the room and spent the rest of the night with Mrs. Murphy, in her room.

On July 19, 1887, Murphy ordered the burner to be removed from the lighthouse lamp and the beam was never again seen.

The community of Grindle in Ersatz County was approaching its second century. Though none of the founding settlers remained, most of the residents could trace their roots back to the original eighteen, and like their predecessors felt a bit out of place beyond the Ersatz environs. They knew that they were square pegs.

They also knew that square pegs, when gathered, fit tightly together leaving no gaps, and form a larger stable square. They viewed that as a good thing, and felt ready and well prepared for their own centennial and what they hoped would be a mellow new century.

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Ersatz County, Indiana The Second Century Ersatz County, Indiana, viewed the new century as a non-event. The transition was as simple as writing nineteen rather eighteen. There was no panic about Y2K, no anguish over computer failure, no tweets of fear.

ENIAC and UNIVAC were a half-century in the future, and high tech was a term unknown.

The Amish and the English were still on common ground, for travel was by foot, horseback, or train. Homes were illuminated by candles or oil lamps and entertainment was a family affair except for the occasional traveling show or circus.

That would soon change.

By 1890 Indianapolis had its first telephones, and in less than a decade more than 600 independent telephone companies were serving the Hoosier heartland. Number 618 was the Greater Grindle Independent Telephone Company, initially serving just two customers, physician Horace Hacker and undertaker Morris Dawkins. The first call, July 3, 1900, was made by Hacker to Dawkins with the terse message, “Youkliss is yours.” Grant Youkliss had succumbed to the rigors of defending his title as Ersatz County Fair Champion Cow-tipper. Apparently distracted by one of the Koetler girls, Youkliss failed to realize that cow 21 was tottering, eventually fatally tipping onto the tipper. Dawkins’ first call, two weeks later, allegedly informed Hacker that, “This one ain’t dead yet. Want her back or should I keep her?”

While history gives Youkliss credit for besting his own record with that twenty-first cow, there is no mention of the resolution to Dawkins’ quandary.

By 1902 progress was in full bloom. The new century was already proving to be a century of change. More than one hundred telephones were in service and all the chatter was about electricity. Electric light was imaginary. Electric light was real. Electric light was safe. Electric light was dangerous. Electric light caused blindness. Electric light was poison. Electric light was healing.

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The Ersatz & Moot Point Railway was thriving and railway president Roy Lee Roy III rode his trains to the road’s limits. He saw what was happening in the world beyond Ersatz County and he looked for opportunity.

Telephones were an opportunity and electricity was a golden opportunity. Roy Lee Roy knew electric light was money in the bank.

An E&MP flatcar brought the dynamo from Schenectady, a retired Baldwin 4-6-4 supplied the steam and the locomotive backshop crew found themselves learning the craft of electrification, sometimes with shocking results.

Grindle, Indiana’s, first public display of electric incandescent illumination came March 16, 1902. Promptly at 7:30 p.m. that night president Roy flipped the switch bathing the E&MP station waiting room in the warm glow of Edison lamps. Originally planned for March 15, Grindle High School English teacher Gertrude Guildenstern urged postponement with the admonition, “Beware, the ides of March.”

Grindle embraced the electric light. In the first year of operation three additional dynamos were in place and a large new permanent boiler house was under construction. Naysayers continued to hang crepe, but by Christmas the only commercial enterprise in downtown Grindle lacking incandescent illumination was the Amish National Bank. The Ersatz & Moot Point Railway was a roaring success. Freight and passenger traffic, aggressive right-of-way acquisition and construction, and an actual commitment to service made the line a veritable money-machine. Under the direction of the Roy family, E&MP operating staff were instructed to always do it best—not fastest nor cheapest.

The result was a railroad that ran on time, had few breakdowns, and even fewer issues with washouts, bridge failures, and unhappy employees.

Roy Lee Roy III was a very modern manager. He had no interest in becoming a robber baron and had no respect for those he dealt with. Roy made it policy to pay employees not merely adequately, or even fairly.

He paid them generously (some would say foolishly). The result was a dedicated staff quite willing to go the literal extra mile, put in the extra hour, and look for the potential new procedural efficiency. There was an unintended ripple effect. With the railroad being such a desirable place to work, to attract and retain quality workers, the city’s other major employers had to follow suit.

It made for an unusually happy place to live.

Early in the company’s history the Roys began a tradition of giving each employee a live turkey for Christmas.

This custom was an immediate success, greeted with joy by every man and woman in the road’s growing corporate family. While the vast majority of the turkeys became part of the festive holiday table, every year, one

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or two would become family pets. It was not unusual to see a Grindle resident enjoying a summer evening stroll leading a turkey on a leash.

In 1913 Roy Lee Roy IV decided to add some variety to the yule dinner. Hearing that one of the railroad’s clients had a surfeit of out of season lambs, Roy bought the total allotment, loaded them into E&MP stock cars, and shipped them to Grindle.

The Friday before Christmas found most of the day shift engine shop crew celebrating payday at the Rip Track Café. They were tossing back, what else . . . boilermakers. Through the Rip Track’s back window they could see the four lamb-packed stock cars waiting for the holiday distribution.

Through a combination of holiday spirits, youthful enthusiasm, and too many rounds of boilermakers, the engine shop boys left the warmth of the Rip Track, made their way across the familiar tracks of the classification yard, opened the great sliding doors on each side of the four stock cars, and had a great laugh as the fluffy white lambs took advantage of freedom and departed, one and all for parts unknown.

Saturday morning dawned bright and chilly. Corny Harnisch, making his rounds snuffing out the kerosene burners in all of the switchstand lamps, was the first to discover the great escape. Actually, Harnisch was the second. At 2 a.m., Elmer Frakes, having closed the Rip Track, was slowly making his way home. Seeing a flock of a dozen or more sheep crossing the intersection of Railroad Avenue and Pringle Street, he was convinced that the vision before him was induced by an excess of Schexnaydor Holiday Ale consumed at the Rip Track.

He changed course and entered at the District 2 police station, and turned himself in to the night-duty officer.

This was not an unusual occurrence and his bed was ready.

Harnisch raised the alarm and within the hour search parties were formed and combing the county for errant sheep. The great roundup became the holiday party of the year. Everyone joined in, and by evening all but six of the four-car flock were accounted for. Two of the strays made themselves at home in the crèche at Our Lady of Sorrows; there they remained with the plaster Holy Family.

The holiday lambs had unintended consequences. Few railroad employees felt competent to slaughter and dress a lamb and even fewer had families willing to allow the act. Soon nearly every E&MP family had a pet lamb. They were cute. They were cuddly. They were growing. And they did not take kindly to attempts at housebreaking.

By the end of February, it was common nearly every night after the houses were dark to see a driver alongside a sheep, in a car or buggy, leaving town, returning forty-five minutes later with no sheep in sight.

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April found the homes of Grindle to be sheep-free. April found the Great Salamander Mound of Ersatz County the new home range of a significant and growing population of sheep. The now feral flock thrived and within five years was a major nuisance. Ersatz County became the only Hoosier governance to have a sanctioned sheep season.

The rest of the world did not share the sunny outlook of Grindle and Ersatz County. In 1914 the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria served as the spark igniting that European affair, the Great War, or the now-preferred World War I. America was not an eager or early participant, and most of the country, like Ersatz County, thought we were best-served by not serving. Gradually the mood of America changed, and eventually even Grindle got the patriotic fever.

While few of the youth of Ersatz County ever left our shores for Europe, there was significant Ersatz participation. More than one hundred young men enlisted, went through basic training at Fort Norbert Pflem, and shipped off to Army’s School of Anachronistic Warfare in Snit, Arkansas. The Ersatz crew learned the fine points of battle axe maintenance, portcullis removal, catapult operation, and battlefield surgery with a broadsword. The skills, well-taught and dutifully learned, were pointless, but did not surprise the boys who had grown up in the shadow of Moot Point.

Grady Krantz was one of few Ersatz County recruits to escape the School of Anachronistic Warfare. He was sent to the School of Hostelry and assigned to the Mule Division. Krantz had grown up plowing the family farm with a mule team and he was delighted to be doing familiar work. The recruit’s joy diminished as it became obvious that motor trucks were displacing mules for military transport. Covington, Kentucky’s, Stewart Iron Works produced more than one hundred trucks for the war effort. Cool heads prevailed and Grady Krantz became a military star of sorts.

It was obvious the war was winding down, but the army wanted to maintain a spirit of excitement and a public presence. The plan was to assemble a carefully matched twenty-mule team, hitched to a spotless olive drab wagon, and send the entire rig to participate in parades, festivals, and fairs throughout the country. Grady Krantz would be the mule skinner, promoted to the rank of lieutenant and assigned two hostlers to do the dirty work.

Krantz was ecstatic, embraced the job, loved the crowds and cheers, and spent sixteen years on tour. Grady Krantz was so invested in his team and its kit that he commissioned a tattoo of the entire thing. Starting at his right wrist, the images of team and wagon ran the full length of his right arm, across his broad shoulders and then down his left arm ending at the left wrist. Robert Ripley was astounded.

It was Grady’s ultimate joy to find his grandson watching Death Valley Days on the family’s 1952 black-andwhite television. He never tired of taking his shirt off to show the boy his own twenty-mule team.

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Once again Grindle left its mark on America. Grady Krantz and his twenty-mule team hitch, along with their wagon, appropriately constructed by the Amish Hostetler brothers in their Ersatz wagon works, did not go unnoticed. The advertising people at Budweiser were impressed by the public clamor for the mules, and as the end of Prohibition approached, they appropriated the concept of brute animal beauty. They dressed up a beer wagon, originally built by the Studebaker Brothers of South Bend, Indiana, and completed the production with a hitch of eight matched Clydesdales.

Perhaps the saddest day in the first third of America’s twentieth century was January 16, 1920. On that date the Volstead Act took effect. With the stroke of a pen thousands of thriving breweries, wineries, and distilleries found themselves unable to sell their products Brewers gathered in desperate meetings trying to find a use for their substantial operations. Skilled employees suddenly found themselves unemployed and without prospect of gainful work using their special skills. Some brewers began bottling soft drinks. Others turned to producing “near beer.” Many simply threw in the towel. The Schexnaydors were in a panic. The Schexnaydor brewery was a sprawling affair. The E&MP hauled their porters, ales, and stouts throughout Indiana and seventeen additional states. Suddenly they were out of business.

As the family council met in the Schexnaydor board room discussing the dark future, young Dieter Schexnaydor, home from college in Bloomington, posed an idea. Dieter said it was time to think new thoughts—to think outside of the barrel.

Dieter’s plan was outrageous—so outrageous it had to work.

The Schexnaydor Brewing Company was located in Grindle, Indiana. Grindle was the seat of Ersatz County.

Everyone knew the definition of ersatz was imitation. Schexnaydor would drop their name from all labels and advertising. Everything they made and sold from thence forward would be renamed—he called it rebranded— Ersatz. The product would remain the same, but the label would clearly state Ersatz Beer, imitation beer.

It was crazy, but sometimes crazy is the perfect solution.

Labels were printed. Freight cars were turned into ten-foot by forty-foot billboards. Calendars, trays, signs, and glasses were produced. The universal message—Ersatz Beer.

Amazingly, the plan worked. For two years there was no question of the product and its content. Then in late November of 1923 the dock foreman of the brewery was approached by a gentleman with a badge and identification proving him a government alcohol enforcement officer. He demanded the dock foreman turn over a case of Ersatz Beer for laboratory testing. The foreman fulfilled the request and then forwarded the bad news to the front office.

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Schexnaydor management waited tensely, expecting the other shoe to drop—a federal raid of the plant and the demise of a great enterprise. Nothing happened for a week. The agent reappeared, met the same foreman and made the same request. Upon the agent’s departure the foreman made the same report to the office. This drama was repeated on a weekly basis until December 5, 1933, when the Blaine Act took effect ending the Great Experiment.

The Schexnaydors had long since accepted the weekly loss of a case of beer as a very small price for the privilege of doing business, and referred to the delivery as the sample for laboratory tasting.

While electricity was a boon to the Roys, it was a bane to the Pringles. The Pringles had turned their small toy shop with its variety of wind-powered novelties into a major concern: designing, manufacturing and installing all sorts of wind-powered devices to bring convenience and efficiency to rural America. Pringle windmills pumped water for farmhouse kitchens, remote cattle watering troughs, and scattered irrigation projects. They produced wind-powered mills to grind flour and wind-powered sawmills to turn trees into planks.

Electricity changed that. The Rural Electrification Act of 1936 was devastating for the Pringle Windworks.

Electricity was traveling into the hollers of Kentucky and Tennessee, across the plains of Kansas and Nebraska, and into the mountains of Colorado and Wyoming. It was as if the high-tension lines were electrocuting the windmills. New orders to Pringle slowed and died. Orders for repair parts dropped to zero and the big manufacturing facility was empty except for a half dozen of the Pringle family steadfastly crafting the toys developed by Grindle founding settler, Klaus Pringle.

Oddly, it was electricity that provided a future for the Pringles, even as it destroyed their present. Windworks CEO Kurt Pringle had faith in the powers of Mona Koetler, carrying on the Koetler tradition of witchcraft.

In 1901 she told Pringle that there was an ill wind in his future and that he must embrace the lightning or succumb to the storm clouds. The reading made little sense to Pringle, but when Roy Lee Roy approached him to invest in the new Grindle Electric Power Company, he noticed the red lightning bolt in the logo of the firm’s prospectus and made a leap of faith. The size of Pringle’s investment and the lack of coercion to get it surprised Roy, but the fact that all necessary capital was in hand made it a very good day indeed.

The income from Grindle Electric allowed the Pringles to maintain their social status, but the loss of their firm cut to the quick. The huge manufacturing plant sat derelict, but the family refused to sell or repurpose the buildings, steadfastly believing another Koetler reading, “The smoke will clear—the wind will win.”

There were more ill winds blowing badly across Ersatz County. Beginning in 1939 newspapers and the radio told stories of German aggression in Poland and beyond. In true Grindle fashion the consensus was to butt

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out. Making the world safe for pierogis and kielbasa seemed small compensation for leaving the comforts of a Hoosier home. December 7, 1941, however, dropped the curtain on laissez-faire complacency.

Overnight, Grindle was ready for war and itching for a fight. Recruiting was brisk. Car after car of young men rode the E&MP rails out of Ersatz County and into a world they knew little of. Unlike in the previous two wars, many left and too many failed to return.

With the men off to war the women at home went to work. Women brewed the beer Schexnaydor sent to base canteens and USO clubs. Mothers learned the operation and maintenance of the E&MP’s great locomotives.

Some served as engineers and conductors. Grandma Koetler, the crone of that witchy clan, organized scrap metal drives and proved her commitment by donating her favorite cauldron. The Goldsmith daughters took control of the S&M Iron Works, retooled for war production, and changed the company motto to “It’s our business to pleasure Jerry.” Outsiders expressed displeasure at a slogan that seemed to give aid and comfort to the enemy, but usually left smiling after learning that S&M’s line of boudoir accessories: manacles, thumb screws, leg irons, and the like were now being turned out three shifts a day to keep German prisoners under control.

It was a happy day in 1945 when the citizens of Grindle saw that the S&M sign had been repainted to the original “Keeping couples together.”

The 1950s were a time of peace and plenty in Ersatz County. The state blessed Grindle with a large new hospital and sanitarium. The Indiana State Home and Hospital for the Terminally Bewildered provided employment for the region and an endless supply of political candidates from its residents. Ersatz County was not the first location considered for the Hospital. In fact, it was the ninety-third. Every other county wanted to avoid the stigma attached to the terminally bewildered. Marion County, home to the state legislature, was particularly eager to bypass selection.

In 1918 Friederick Wurzelbacher stepped off the 4:15 from Muncie hoping to buy a copy of the Indianapolis Star.

The news butcher, a young Native American, saw the tension in Wurzelbacher’s face and posture and gave him not only the Star, but a handful of mushrooms. Friederick, in a rare moment of daring, swallowed the entire dose. The effects were immediate. Wurzelbacher relaxed, did not reboard the train, and lived out his days in Grindle.

Friederick Wurzelbacher had been on a mission. He was searching for the location to build a fine piano factory. Wurzelbacher came from a long line of piano builders and distant relatives were known to build, maintain, or modify instruments for Beethoven, Liszt, Chopin, and most recently, Rachmaninoff. Now he was in a new country dreaming of following the family tradition, but in a shop of his own.

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Ersatz County was the ideal end-of-the-line for Wurzelbacher’s quest. The native timber supplied the highestgrade stock for cases, soundboards, and hammers, and the large Amish population provided a ready-made staff of craftsmen gifted with patience, love of quality, and superb skills with traditional hand tools. S&M Iron gladly provided the cast iron plates.

Wurzelbacher’s pianos met with success, providing the Ersatz & Moot Point with another major local shipper.

By 1960 a third generation Wurzelbacher was at the helm, and he was a young man consumed with curiosity and a skeptical view of tradition. Making pianos was a given. Making the same old pianos was not. Wolfgang Wurzelbacher designed the opposite hand grand, a concert grand configured so that the soloist faced stage right rather than stage left while performing. The opposite-hand grand was a great favorite of Pierre DeWalt, who preferred a position allowing the audience to see his dueling scar.

Other design experiments included the Wurzelbacher Complete, an instrument boasting black, white, and gray keys. The gray keys provided the quarter tones. The Complete was an immediate failure. The mass of nontraditional keys resulted in an instrument with a seven-foot keyboard. It was virtually unplayable. Greater success was found with the Wurzelbacher 100. Sporting six extra keys for both the treble and bass, the piano was a monster, but playable. Wolfgang regretted that Charles Ives had died in 1954, feeling the daring composer would have used the extended range brilliantly. He took solace when the experimental John Cage enthusiastically embraced the 100, producing a special arrangement of his classic 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence specifically for the incomparable Wurzelbacher 100.

The late sixties and early seventies brought another war. Ersatz County watched her young men leave for basic training not in trains, but in buses. Passenger rail travel was fading. Again, too many of those young men did not come back. Or they returned by train, in flag-draped coffins. It was not a good war for Grindle, Ersatz, or the country. More than a few residents, and most returning vets, turned to mushrooms to heal.

Ersatz county closed its second century with three related civic additions. The Koetlers owned the north side of the county’s largest and highest hill. They realized it was ideal territory for a ski slope. Starting small with a bunny slope and a rope tow, the resort was a hit and grew exponentially. In five short years The Witch’s Kiss Ski Resort was a popular destination with guests arriving from neighboring states—many by train. The snow was powder and everyone was happy when it was as cold as a witch’s kiss.

Second to boost the city and county was the legalization of gambling on Indian lands. The Moxitoxic people may have been mushroom mellow, but they knew agriculture and horticulture. Gambling looked like low-hanging fruit.

The first gambit with gambling was a modest bingo hall. High stakes bingo seemed an easy way to test the waters.

The test was short-lived. Within weeks of opening, the hall was running at capacity, three shifts a day and seven 20

days a week. Tour buses and trains brought geezers in search of action from the four corners of the state. And no matter how large their losses, every single player went home happy, thanks to the complimentary mushrooms.

It took only three years to transition to full Las Vegas-style gambling in a massive new Moxitoxic Casino emblazoned with ten-foot neon letters proclaiming ToxMahal. Letters of complaint from a New York legal firm, alleging copyright infringement on the name, were met with a gift box of mushrooms, the first in a monthly string. No further threat of action was ever made.

The final leg of the three-legged civic advantage stool was the county’s first amusement park. Not just an amusement park, but a theme park. The Amish community, though unable to own televisions, was well aware of what was happening on television. At night dozens of buggies would park in front of Mergler’s Appliance store.

Mergler left several televisions in the front window turned on each night, an enticing glowing temptation to passersby. The Amish took advantage of the free entertainment, and especially enjoyed The Wonderful World of Disney.

Weekly references to Disneyland lit the flame of creative endeavor in the simple folk and they soon began the venture eventually named Amish Kingdom.

Used to barn-raisings, the Hostetlers, Millers, Yoders, and Coblenzes joined forces, and in one amazing weekend created the first phase of Amish Kingdom.

English arrived by car, bus, and train and got in line for The Butter Churn of Death, Silo Jump, Spinning Wheel Whirl and Hurl, and especially the drive-it-yourself Amish Buggies.

Lines were long and soon the park posted signs reading, “Enjoy yourself. This is the fastest you will move all day. Line-jumping is cause for shunning at Amish Kingdom.” The signs proved as popular as the rides and many were liberated, to later reappear in college dorm rooms.

Tourism required promotion, and the Ersatz County Visitor and Tourist Board was formed. Their first project was to brand their long-neglected home. While the sign at Grindle city limits still read, “Grindle, we have to call it home,” new billboards were placed on Route 18 boldly stating, “Ersatz County . . . Keeping it Real!”

As Ersatz approached its third century, the Pringles found truth in the second Koetler prophesy. Coal-fired power plants were in decline. Clean air standards were clearing the clouds away, and there was an obvious opportunity for anyone who understood the wind to take advantage of a nascent wind turbine industry. The once mighty Pringle Windworks would be back in business.

But that is the stuff of another century.

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Dutch Treat Ersatz County, Indiana, like major league sports, spawns dynasties. Baseball breeds multi-generational combinations of stellar hitters, pitchers, and fielders. Ersatz County and the city of Grindle parent families genetically linked to politics.

Grindles dominate county politics and Murphys run the city.

Deuteronomy Murphy was one of the original band of wanderers to settle in what is now Grindle, Indiana.

Being “Pennsylvania Dutch,” and feeling Deuteronomy to be burdensome, he adopted informally, and eventually legally, the name Dutch.

Dutch Murphy was Grindle’s first mayor, and there has been at least one—often two and occasionally three Dutch Murphys—holding office ever since.

To avoid confusion no one refers to any of the eight distinguished Murphys as Dutch. Each is invariably referenced by his number within the Murphy lineage.

Thus, while Five was serving as mayor, Four was in Indianapolis as a state legislator, and Three filled a congressional seat in Washington.

Today Eight is fulfilling the mayoral election-year tradition to personally plant the hardy chrysanthemums, which greet visitors to Ersatz County’s fall color festival.

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The Great Switchback The first decade of the 1900s found Indiana in a convulsion of road building. To hasten completion of the system, competing contractors were given the task of building the same road from opposite termini working toward each other. These contractors were paid by the miles of road built.

When it came time to build State Route 18 through Ersatz County, the incentive of payment by the mile coupled with a survey party’s ignorance of magnetic declination caused the opposing ends of the new road to miss each other. Nearly twenty-seven miles of roughly parallel road was constructed before state inspectors found the error and halted the runaway construction. Eventually a solution was worked out allowing all of the road to be used, but causing the traveler miles of backtracking. Grindle, Indiana, was located along the great switchback.

In 1964 the Indiana State Highway Department constructed the new Route 18 Bypass trimming off dozens of old excess miles, bypassing the town of Grindle into oblivion. Today no one drives through Grindle, Indiana, unless the city itself is their goal.

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Necessity Begets Ingenuity The modernization of Route 18 through Ersatz County, Indiana, shortened travel time from Muncie to Logansport by more than an hour. It also cut travel through Grindle, Indiana, by nearly 80 percent. The lost income to restaurants, gas stations, and motels was devastating. In a desperate attempt at survival the Grindle Chamber of Commerce, under the leadership of its president and Incident Inn owner Grover Mergler, had new directional signs painted. The Mergler-inspired signs were identical to the Highway Department’s except the indicators for Route 18 and Bypass 18 were reversed.

Installation of the ersatz directional signs brought an immediate influx of tourists and cash. Every three or four months the Indiana State Highway Department discovers the signs have been changed and installs corrected ones. Within hours Mergler and friends once again take the situation in hand, install their own signs and save their businesses from economic ruin.

Through the years, Mergler’s faction has removed enough state-issued signs to completely reroof the picnic pavilion in Roy Park.

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The Incident Inn Starting with a row of six simple cabins in 1936, the Merglers’ business grew with the travel lodging industry.

While Grindle, Indiana, may seem slow and quaint to some, the Merglers understood people, progress, and profit. They knew that, just as in the food-service industry, the bottom line depended on the number of individuals able to use the facilities available.

Early on, Vince Mergler realized the traditional motel room-rental structure was counterproductive. Vince believed no lodger should pay for more than he needed. The result was Incident Inn’s pay-as-you-stay plan.

Rooms were listed at a modest hourly rate and visitors beat a path to the registration desk.

While other establishments took pride in a 70- or 80-percent occupancy rate, the Incident Inn boasted occupancy exceeding 318 percent five consecutive years.

Some uninformed visitors take umbrage at room rates leading to overnight charges of five hundred or more dollars. The Inn’s regulars find the rates fair and reasonable, eagerly signing their John Smith on the line above the Incident Inn’s now-famous slogan, “All of our rooms have beds . . . many have linens.”

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The Chief On July 18, 1944, Harris Farley left his wife Emma and seven-year-old son Harley to walk to the store for a quart of milk and a tub of pineapple, chive cottage cheese. He never returned.

With the family breadwinner out of the picture, Emma began baking and selling pastries to earn a Iiving. Her cottage industry was a resounding success, and in a short time the business had moved out of their home and into its own quarters.

Mother Farley’s Kruller Kitchen earned fame beyond the Ersatz County line, and police from three neighboring counties found excuses to do business in Ersatz County—just for the chance to stop by Mother Farley’s.

Harley Farley grew up in the Kruller Kitchen. He admired, respected, and loved the officers that frequented the place. The law men, in return, adopted the young boy, treating him as one of their own. It was only natural that he entered the police academy after high school graduation.

On July 18, 1958, Harley Farley graduated from the academy and was sworn in as a rookie on the Grindle police force. That night, while Harley and Emma shared dinner in the kitchen, Harris Farley returned with a quart of milk and a tub of pineapple, chive cottage cheese. Harley immediately cuffed the elder Farley and took him to the station.

As Emma Farley had declared Harris legally dead after his seventh year of absence, young officer Farley charged his late father with unlawful entry and tampering with a corpse.

None could doubt that Harley Farley was serious about police business, and Grindle, Indiana, rewarded him with the title of chief on his thirty-fifth birthday—the same day Emma Farley was recognized by the Hoosier Sheriffs Association for excellence in doughnuts.

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The Smiley Brothers Omer Smiley rode into Grindle, Indiana, on the 1:17, September 9, 1918, eager to make his first call as a representative of the MidWest Mortuary Supply Company.

At 2:01, sharp, Smiley walked into Gerkin’s Mortuary, strolled back to the preparation room, and found Arthur Gerkin face down, cold as a carp on top of the late Morris Dawkins.

Without missing a beat, Omer finished Mr. Dawkins and moved right on to the deceased mortician.

Twenty-four hours later Smiley owned the mortuary, resigned his sales job, and was well on his way to becoming the embalming king of Central Indiana.

Omer Smiley’s grandsons remain in Ersatz County. Trent and Gilbert oversee the Smiley Brothers’ Mortuaries, the Mega Mortuary Mall, Veil of Tears Bridal Chapel, and Valhalla Mobile Home Estates. Dr. Mort Smiley Is the area’s leading obstetrician.

In 1995 Smiley Brothers changed its slogan from “Digging Your Family for Three Generations,” to “We Brought You In—We’ll Take You Out.”

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Grindle Patriot Warren Pease was the entire 1933 graduating class of the Veedersburg Military Academy of Veedersburg, Indiana. Due in part to his academic achievements (valedictorian, salutatorian and class president) and in part to his military accomplishments (student corps commander, highest ranking cadet, and recipient of the Dewey Medal), Pease was instantly accepted for service by the army recruiting officer in hometown Koontz Lake.

Upon arrival at Fort Norbert Pflem, his qualifications were immediately noticed and he bypassed basic training to assume the duties of fort tack officer. While friends and relatives read his letters home and understood him to be the senior tactical officer for the base, the truth was less exciting. Warren Pease spent his days—and many of his nights—polishing, waxing, and oiling the saddles, bridles, bits, and other paraphernalia belonging to the mounts in the commandant’s stable.

Pease left his country’s service forty-five years later with the rank of corporal and membership in the International Order of the Silver Snaffle.

Missing the train home to Koontz Lake, Warren Pease spent the afternoon of his mustering out wandering the streets of downtown Grindle. By the time the next train arrived, Pease had decided to stay in Grindle and make it home.

Since that bright November day in 1978, Warren Pease has made it his duty and mission to maintain and protect the Veterans Memorial Underpass where Rt. 18 crosses beneath the Ersatz & Moot Point mainline to Dithering, Kentucky.

At Neal Sneffrin’s Pharmacy you can purchase a postcard of Warren entitled, “The Grindle Patriot.”

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The Lady Conductor In 1945 an eighteen-year-old Doris Menke graduated from Grindle High School and immediately married her long-time boyfriend, Casey Callahan. World War II was winding down, but the infantry decided it needed a young locomotive fireman, and Casey was off to basic training.

Casey Callahan wasn’t the only Ersatz & Moot Point Railway crew loss to the war effort. The ranks of brakemen, carmen, and dispatchers were depleted as well. Rosie may have become a riveter, but Doris signed on as a conductor. Doris Menke Callahan was one of the few, and perhaps the first woman to carry papers as a conductor on any class one American railroad.

Doris became a true railroader, performing exceptionally and with utter reliability until one hot and sultry August afternoon in 1947.

While her train stood in the hole outside of Moot Point waiting for a passenger special full of returning servicemen to pass on the mainline, her water broke and she delivered—much to the amazement and consternation of rookie brakeman Frank Dillbeck—a 7-pound, 8-ounce baby boy, right in their caboose.

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Casey Callahan Casey Callahan graduated from old Grindle High School, married Doris Menke, his high school sweetheart, and went to work as a fireman on the Ersatz & Moot Point Railway on three consecutive days in June of 1945. Within six weeks he was serving his country as the Officers’ Club Croquet Court Orderly at nearby Fort Norbert Pflem.

Callahan served his country diligently both on the croquet court and as the second tenor in the Pflemtones, a vocal ensemble which entertained new recruits and injured servicemen recovering in the local VA convalescent hospital.

After discharge, Casey returned to Grindle, Indiana, and the Ersatz & Moot Point. He quickly rose to the rank of engineer and worked the time freight from Grindle to Dithering, Kentucky, until his retirement in 1987.

Unable to leave railroading, Casey Callahan now serves as engineer on the train carrying children and their parents around the grounds of the Roy Zoological Gardens in his hometown of Grindle.

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Crummy Kid Kevin Callahan was born to the rails. While his father, locomotive fireman Casey Callahan, was serving his country as the Officers’ Club Croquet Court Orderly at Fort Norbert Pflem, his mother was working as a conductor for the Ersatz & Moot Point Railway.

Doris Callahan was a conscientious railroader, eager for each day’s run and loath to miss a single mile on the rails. Her devotion to duty resulted in the untimely delivery of Kevin, her only son, in the caboose of an E&MP freight one hot August afternoon in 1947. Railroaders have a plethora of names for the caboose— bobber, cabin, hack, and crummy are a few. Though christened Kevin, Doris and Casey’s son was never known by any name other than “The Crummy Kid.” Whether It was the unique architecture of his birthing suite or because of some fluke of gene or disposition, The Crummy Kid was linked by an unseen umbilical to the railroad. At age sixteen he packed a bedroll and hopped a slow freight out of town. Every week since that June in 1964, The Crummy Kid has sent a postcard to Doris, Casey and his semi-identical twin sisters Meg and Sidney Jane.

Several times each year The Crummy Kid returns to Grindle revisiting what remains of where it all started.

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Designing Woman As an eigth-grade science fair project Margaret “Meg” Callahan designed and built a ten-foot long truss bridge completely of wood tongue depressors appropriated from the school nurse’s office. The bridge was so well designed with such attention to stress, torque, and the tensile properties of wooden tongue depressors that It could support the weight of both Shorty and his bowling ball, Bally, without noticeable deflection.

With her high-school diploma in hand and visions of bridges and tunnels in her mind, Meg entered both the structural and civil engineering programs at MIME—Manhattan Institute of Mining and Engineering in Manhattan, Montana.

Meg’s senior thesis, “The Effects and Implications of Non-Euclidean Track Geometry on Toe-ln and Camber as Manifested in Flangewear of Forged Steel Wheel Sets,” was presented to the International Conference of New Millennium Truck Technology and judged “Visionary.”

After graduation Meg turned down job offers from every major class one railroad in America, as well as offers from the United Nations and NASA, to return to her home in Grindle, Indiana. She was immediately named chief engineer of track, bridges, and structures for the Ersatz & Moot Point Railway.

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Wrench Wench While her girlfriends wrapped class rings with angora yarn and the boys her age worked to resurrect junkyard Chevies in time for their sixteenth birthdays, Sidney Jane Callahan spent her time with a derelict General Electric 44-ton diesel switch engine left to rust on the last track of the E&MP’s Grindle engine facility. By the time high school graduation rolled around, Sidney Jane had restored the little switcher to pristine condition and its diesel engine purred like the proverbial kitten.

The direction of Sidney Jane’s future was obvious and it came as no surprise that she enrolled in the Manhattan International School of Diesel Mechanics in Manhattan, Kansas. Through extraordinary diligence and prodigious use of overnight mail Sidney Jane completed the three-year correspondence course in just six months, received honors and commendations from the school, and was immediately hired as a junior mechanic by the Ersatz & Moot Point Railway. Two years later at age twenty-one, she became chief diesel mechanic for the entire railway.

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Dennis Dillbeck Son of an Ersatz & Moot Point brakeman, Dennis Dillbeck grew up fascinated with numbers. Dennis would count the number of wheels on the slow freights that traveled the track behind his house. He counted hopper cars, box cars, flat cars, and tank cars. He counted gondolas, cabooses, locomotives, and stock cars. He kept records of everything he counted.

Through high school Dennis Dillbeck worked summers in the E&MP shop parts department. He counted fuel injectors, brake shoes, glad hands, and angle cocks.

His counts were always right.

After high school Dennis spent two years in the business and accounting program at Grindle Community College and then made the quantum leap to the state university in Bloomington. He was in his element, eventually graduating with degrees in accounting, computer sciences, and economics.

With an envelope full of diplomas under his arm Dennis and partner David returned to Grindle. Dennis immediately took on the task of dragging the Ersatz & Moot Point Railway out of its Dickensian state and onto the information superrailway. A talented cook, master carpenter, gifted designer, and avid gardener, David developed a syndicated television program, a monthly magazine, and a line of signature products by combining aspects of Bob Villa and Julia Child.

Together, Dennis and David produce enough homemade carrot cake to feed four thousand at the annual Taste of Grindle. There are never leftovers.

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Two Bobbits Joe Bob Bobbit grew up an outcast. Born in a Missouri town that viewed culture in terms of long nights gigging for frogs and endless games of 8-ball, Joe Bob fell in love with fine art. Each week he would watch the snow-filled television picture of a bearded man with a huge Lucite palette and a two-inch nylon sash tool paint mountain landscapes with rushing rivers and snowy waterfalls.

Eventually he gathered the courage to try to duplicate the picture of a pirate on a matchbook cover and send it to the admissions department of the Famous Artists Institute Internationale of Dillard, Georgia. He was accepted without hesitation.

For three years Joe Bob eagerly awaited the monthly mailing of new matchbooks and their challenging assignments.

When graduation time came Joe Bob packed and made the trip to Dillard. There he was overwhelmed by the student art exhibit. All four walls of the institute’s repurposed Pure Oil station were covered with wonderful works by other graduates. Finally he found his entry, and Bobbie Jo Farley of Grindle. Joe Bob and Bobbie Jo had completed and submitted the same paint-by-number interpretation of Durer’s Praying Hands. After comparing each other’s brush technique, sharing a Nehi Grape soda and exploring downtown Dillard by moonlight, the two decided to marry.

Joe Bob and Bobbie Jo returned to Grindle, teaching art to preschool children and the residents of the Golden Autumn Retirement Community. Eventually they were appointed co-curators of the Olivia Grindle Hoosier Folk Art Collection of Grindle Community College.

The Bobbits are involved with a cutting-edge project developing a greenware flocking process able to withstand the high temperatures of kiln-firing.

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PA R T I I

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The Blizzard of ’18 There is a universal urge to use major natural events to mark the passage of time. Some are predictable—the summer of the cicadas. Most are singular—the earthquake of 1906, the flood of ’37, the tornadoes of ’74. For the residents of Grindle, Indiana, the universal natural point of reckoning is the Blizzard of ’18.

December had been unpredictable. Pearl Harbor Day was marked by seven inches of fresh snow. Christmas was sunny and peaked at forty-five degrees. Dreams of a white Christmas were unrequited.

The winter of 2017 was literally a walk in the park.

January of 2018 looked to be more of the same. Moderate temperatures and no significant snow.

Bjorn and Raven had to run the Witch’s Kiss snow machines full time trying to keep the slopes skiable.

That all changed the night of January 17. The sky turned leaden and the temperature fell. The afternoon high of forty-seven degrees dropped to an overnight low of fifteen, snow fell and Raven Koetler, the witch, smiled as if she had seen this coming for days, some say weeks, before.

The dawn of the eighteenth broke bright and snow-filled. Twelve inches of fresh powder covered the county. The Koetlers hit social media letting the world know that the Witch’s Kiss was not just open for business, but in exceptionally fine condition. They claimed, with reason, that Ersatz County could provide a skiing experience comparable to Steamboat Springs.

Almost immediately the phones at the Ersatz & Moot Point Railway began ringing and tickets on the special train to the ski resort were at a premium. It seemed like half of Indianapolis wanted to drive to Grindle and then have the E&MP haul them the final fifteen miles to the resort.

The snow continued.

Bambi Roy, Ersatz County Poet Laureate, and wife of E&MP president Roy Lee Roy was inspired.

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The world outside is white.

The hills are white.

The valleys are white.

Even the trees,

And my red Mercedes Are white.

Everything I see is white—

Except where Fifi is standing—

It’s yellow.

The ode was published in the Poet’s Corner of the January nineteenth Grindle Post-Leader.

The snow continued.

Grindilians refer to the affluent young skiers from downstate as the pretty people. They arrive in late-model cars with foreign names. Their clothing is carefully coordinated and their conversation is fueled by white wine and soft French cheese.

By now the pretty people were arriving in droves. Their numbers reminded the pious of the plagues in Exodus.

The train station parking lot looked like a ready lot at the Volvo factory. Welcoming the unexpected income, the Smiley brothers were parking overflow BMWs, Audis, and Volvos on empty lots at their Valhalla Mobile Home Estates. The E&MP trainmaster added four extra coaches, a dining car, and a club car to the ski train special, and the world was good.

The snow continued.

While the pretty people brought welcome revenue to the Witch’s Kiss, some began to realize the magnitude of the situation. Roads were impassable, the railway was snowbound and things were getting touchy at the Kiss.

A particularly potent gust blew open the double doors to the dining room, resulting in the demise of forty or more Boston ferns. A contingent of snowbunnies spent the morning keening and wailing over the botanical tragedy. White wine consumption achieved mid-morning levels previously unknown.

The snow continued.

Bjorn and Raven were getting desperate. The pretty people were eating and drinking their way through the resort’s inventory at a prodigious rate. The French cheese was gone. Cheez Whiz was an unwelcome

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substitute. The end of the white wine was in sight and paper goods were in alarmingly short supply.

The snow continued.

Bjorn made a desperate call to the railroad. Desperate times call for desperate measures. E&MP division chief Cal Pringle called for the old steam rotary snowblower to be fired up and tasked with clearing the track to the Witch’s Kiss. Although well maintained and smartly painted, the big rotary had last seen service in 1941. For years it had stood ready, occupying a stub of track behind the Rip Track Café, Pool Hall and Emporium.

The crew manning the blower fired the boiler, built up a head of steam, and engaged the rotary blades.

It was dramatic. All summer the Rip Track regulars had entertained themselves by trying to throw empty longnecks through the bar’s open rear window into the exhaust stack of the big rotary. Now, at full power, the blower pelted the Rip Track with a barrage of empty bottles. A couple of the boys put down their mugs long enough to nail an old tin Nehi sign over the devastated window, and Thelma mourned the loss of so many bottle deposits.

The snowblower wasn’t through yet. The crew on the blower proceeded to the mainline without considering where the blown snow was landing. This lack of forethought added an additional three feet of snow to all the Volvos, Audis, and BMWs in the station parking lot. Some of those cars weren’t seen again until March Supplies, except white wine, made it through. Although the wine eventually ran out, the pretty people developed a great appreciation for the local Schexnaydor brews. While most of the visitors had initially planned a two- or three-day trip, none spent less than five weeks, returning to the capital with a penchant for lamb goetta, a passion for medicinal mushrooms, a love for frosty Schexnaydor longnecks, a longing for mother Farley’s krullers, and a disdain for French cheese and white wine.

Whether Ersatz-born or blizzard-adopted, the Blizzard of ’18 became the indelible mark in history.

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The Dames While the nation boasts the Daughters of the American Revolution, Indiana celebrates and venerates her heritage with the Historic Hoosier Dames. Admission to the Dames requires direct lineage to a family living in Indiana at the time the territory became the union’s nineteenth state in 1816.

The Grindle Gaggle of the Historic Hoosier Dames is even more exclusive than the state organization. Each Grindle Dame can claim descendancy from one of the eighteen families originally brought to the Hoosier Anomaly by self-acclaimed guide Worthy Grindle.

While none of those original eighteen families really wanted to stay in what was to become Grindle and Ersatz County, they were left with no real choice. After an eleven-month journey on an inexplicable route through what is now portions of Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Ohio, the weary travelers declared an end to their wanderings when the wheels literally fell off their deteriorating wagons. With no way to go forward, the group put down roots where they were, and few have ever chosen to leave.

Keeping perennial watchful eyes on the affairs of the Dames is brewing heiress Katrina Schexnaydor, Ersatz & Moot Point Railway chairperson Edith Roy, and Gaggle Grand Dame Hedwig Pringle.

Pringle has worn Historic Hoosier Dame’s Bonnet of Authority through an unprecedented eleven terms of office.

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The Leader of the Flock Father Myron Greenburg has been pastor of Grindle’s Our Lady of Sorrows Church for more than a quarter of a century, a diocesan record. Father Myron’s tenure is not a measure of appreciation by the archbishop or the love of his flock. Father Myron’s tenure is a sort of life sentence handed down from the chancery to assure safekeeping of a triangular peg that fits none of the available round holes.

Father Myron was a brilliant seminarian, but became obsessed with the idea that Vatican II was missing a basic concept. He agreed that the Mass had too long been presented in Latin. He disagreed, however, that it should be bowdlerized and put into the language of the people. Christ was a Jew. The Jews spoke Hebrew.

The Mass should be said in the language of the Savior—Hebrew. Greenburg noted that the Pope was frequently pictured wearing a yarmulke.

Teaching himself Hebrew, Greenburg went about translating the Mass and then celebrating it, while still an associate pastor at the St. Rumwald Shelter for Unwed Fathers.

Reaction was immediate. The just recently ordained Father Myron was given his own parish, Our Lady of Sorrows, Grindle, Indiana.

Some communities have trouble accepting newcomers. A four- or five-generation civic history is required to be truly included. Grindle, Indiana, is not among these socially discriminating municipalities.

Perhaps a town that is home to an Amish theme park, North America’s only Druid earthworks, a ski resort run by a Swede and a witch, and the state’s only home for the bewildered can’t be too choosy in selecting its citizens. Or it might be as Raven Koetler, the witch at the ski lodge says, that the folks inhabiting Ersatz County are either born there or are former residents who went to the Summerland, reincarnated in new locales, and followed their personal paths back to Grindle.

Whatever the reason, Father Myron is never viewed as the priest from Muncie. He is good as Grindle-born, and that is good enough.

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Brother Earnest B. Dough On a slow summer’s afternoon in 1954, Earnest B. Dough took the keys to a four-door Tucker on the front line of his father’s car lot, and cruised to the Great Salamander Mound of Moot Point, Indiana. At the mound Earnest dozed on the lush grass and had a vision.

The vision featured the smiling Earnest B. Dough surrounded by a sea of Ersatz County feral sheep.

Awakening, Earnest found not a flock, but a single ewe licking his face. It was a sign. Dough returned the Tucker to the lot, bought a red-letter bible at Acme Emporium and began his crusade.

He was a natural, and soon the visionary flock was reality.

Park benches gave way to tent meetings and tent meetings gave way, after the new multiplex cinema had sucked the life from the old Grindle Bijou, to the Brother Earnest B. Dough Bijou Full Immersion Tabernacle and Kosher Espresso Bar. Knowing a good crusade is the best insurance for success, Brother Earnest B. Dough picked the Blue Caboose Gentlemen’s Club as the target of his righteous wrath. While picketing the community fleshpot, cold winter weather coupled with the physical needs brought on by a quart of hot black coffee, forced Brother Earnest to seek comfort and relief in the club’s accommodations.

That brief trip of necessity lead to Brother Earnest’s continuing, nightly campaign of one-on-one counseling with the club’s dancers.

The Bunt sisters, Brendas A., B., and C., have remarked that the dollar bills they place in the Tabernacle’s collection plate each Sunday all seem to return to their garters by Friday.

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The Three Ersatz Bs Tradition and sharing are concepts that have shaped the lives of Grindle’s Bunt triplets. Bunt family tradition demands naming the first-born of each sex after the child’s respective parent. Hence, when Brenda Lee and Hanson Bunt were blessed with beautiful identical triplet girls there was no choice but to name the girls; Brenda A, Brenda B, and Brenda C. Sharing came at once. The three babies shared one name, one twin bed customized with wood slats around the mattress for a crib, and their mother’s two breasts for sustenance. Later the girls were known to share their homework, their chores, and on occasion their boyfriends.

Eventually all three found employment in the business office of the Ersatz & Moot Point Railway. Efficient employees by day the Bunt triplets attended evening classes at Grindle Community College at night. When there was insufficient room for all three triplets to enter the same section of a class in elementary poultry management they elected to enroll in an experimental workshop in exotic dance.

To share their new skills with the public the Brendas left the halls of academe in favor of the runway and brass poles of the Blue Caboose Gentlemen’s Club and Review. Three nights a week the Bunt triplets leave their office job, drive across town, and perform to a house packed with locomotive engineers, conductors, shop men and others from their E&MP family At the end of each week they pool their substantial tips, sharing one third with Brenda Lee and Hanson, one third with Brother Earnest B. Dough Bijou Full Immersion Tabernacle and Kosher Espresso Bar, and one third for a wild night of high-stakes bingo on the Moxitoxic Reservation.

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Brenda A (top left) Brenda B (top right) Brenda C (bottom left)

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Conscience of a Community Heiress to a considerable fortune earned in plumbing patents, Latitia Ballcock had neither the desire nor the need to find and follow a normal career path. Instead, she adopted the role of social conscience and community activist.

On her way to a protest march in Splunge, Mississippi, Ballcock paused in Grindle, Indiana, to refuel at Gary’s Really Good Gas. It took mere moments for Latitia to sense the dearth of social activism and the palpable ignorance of civil rights issues in Indiana’s ninety-third county.

The needs were so obvious, so great, and so unnoticed that Ballcock canceled her southern trip and took up permanent residence in Grindle, becoming, as described in a Grindle Post-Leader story, “the burr under Ersatz County’s long comfortable saddle blanket.”

At first Latitia wrote the letters to the editor, carried the signs on the picket lines, and engaged in the boycotts—alone. She was both the yin and yang of society’s ills, slights, and outrages.

Eventually Ballcock gathered a small band of locals who found the daily calls to protest an entertaining change from interminable games of seven-pocket pool at the Rip Track.

Latitia Ballcock lives by the principles that every solution has at least one problem and that if you can’t find the problem before you, you just aren’t trying.

Latitia and her band are now part of the warp and woof of Grindle’s social fabric. The Post-Leader no longer sends a photographer to cover the day’s inevitable protest, choosing instead to run a well-worn file photo of the group, a photo pinned to the editor’s bulletin board with the hand-written caption, “Round up the usual suspects.”

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Pumpboy Cephas Schaumleffel never planned on a career in petroleum retailing. Cephas Schaumleffel had never planned on anything at all.

One Thursday afternoon a fourteen-year-old Cephas stopped at Gary’s Really Good Gas for an after-school Moon Pie and Nehi Grape. Gary, Sr. was busy, short-handed, and asked Cephas to wash the windshield of Enid Roy’s Kaiser while he topped off the tank.

Cephas Schaumleffel had found his place. He would be a pumpboy.

Through all four years of high school part-time, and thereafter full-time, hot, cold, dry, wet, wind, snow, sleet or sunshine you could count on finding Cephas looking sharp—hair trimmed and combed, nails clean, white shirt crisp, and uniform jacket sharp, ready to pump your gas, check your oil, clean the bugs off the glass, and check the air in all four tires. If time were available, he would check the spare tire as well.

Gary, Jr. awarded Cephas his forty-year service pin in 1998. The Grindle Post-Leader covered the event and claimed in the story that Schaumleffel had once correctly gauged the tire pressure of eighteen vehicles without the use of any mechanical aid.

Times have changed and pump boys are a disappearing breed. Yet, Cephas Schaumleffel persists with pride.

The Benevolent and Protective Association of American Gas Sellers still names a Grand National Pump Boy each year. Cephas has received the Grand National award ten times in his forty-plus year career. The ten Golden Nozzle plaques commemorating his achievement share the Schaumleffel living room wall with his wife’s most treasured painting—a life-sized crying Elvis on blue velvet.

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A Legend Omie Jones had his first boyhood crush before he even entered kindergarten.

Omie was head-over-heels in love with radio. For Omie Jones radio was a religious experience. The family joked that young Omie heard voices—Grandpa Barber on One Man’s Family, Don McNeil on his Breakfast Club, Arthur Godfrey, Lowell Thomas, and more.

His friends built forts and treehouses. Omie Jones built radio studios. Closets became announce booths, the pantry was master control, the garage became an audience participation studio. Tin cans nailed to broom handles served as microphones and scripts were written on lined manila paper with fat, smudgy elementary school pencils.

In high school the crush became a full-blown love affair. There were real microphones in the Jones broadcast studios and the productions were now committed to seven-inch reels of magnetic tape. Omie was serious.

After graduating from Grindle Consolidated High School, Omie Jones enrolled in the Gladys Muckenfuss Academie of Charm, Deportment and Elocution. The Academie gave Omie everything he needed for his dream career.

Jones could walk not just with a single book balanced on his head, but with the first seven volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary. Omie Jones mastered twenty-seven distinct styles of handshake and eleven different curtsies. Jones traded his forty-two-volume first-edition collection of Hardy Boys mysteries for a leather-bound copy of the NBC Handbook of Pronunciation, and memorized every entry.

Graduating with honors, Omie Jones was snapped up by hometown broadcast powerhouse WWEMP—the nation’s only five-letter call sign due to a variety of sloppy application mistakes and worse FCC application review errors—and never looked back.

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Elmer and Heather One cold and rainy November morning, a young woman entered the Mixing Bowl, crossed the tile floor, sat at the counter, and dug through the pockets of the soaked overalls she was wearing, eventually retrieving $1.37. Without looking at a menu, the shivering, wet stranger asked Elmer to bring whatever the pile of coins would buy.

Within minutes the counter was filled with eggs, goetta, hotcakes, bacon, grits, oatmeal, sausages, biscuits, ham, orange juice, and coffee. Elmer separated seventy-five cents from the stack, rang up the sale, and stood back to watch the quiet young woman deal with the feast.

A half hour later the food was gone. The slender stranger had consumed everything, and still without speaking she arose, walked to the corner behind the counter, took the broom standing there and swept the dining room floor. She filled and straightened the salts, peppers, and sugars on each table, cleaned the finger prints off the glass front door, picked up an order pad from the cash register, and waited tables during the lunch rush.

At closing time, Elmer still didn’t know the girl’s name, but a bond had formed, and he offered her the use of the empty room upstairs. The girl accepted the lodging and while leaving said, “You can call me Heather.”

Ever since that day, Heather has been part of the Mixing Bowl. Diners know her quiet presence and smile are vital ingredients in Elmer’s meatloaf, fried chicken, and feral lamb pie.

After five years, not even Elmer knows Heather’s last name, or where she came from. Somehow it just doesn’t matter.

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The Planning Commission For decades Claude and George Coot have met dally with a handful of Grindle’s other most senior citizens to discuss affairs of local, national, and International importance. The old Coots and their friends have opinions on everything and advice for everyone, and while they have no authority they are known universally as The Planning Commission.

Through the years The Planning Commission has met on the bench in front of the Acme Emporium, a booth at the Mixing Bowl, an underused parlor at Smiley Brothers Mortuary, and the main reading room at the Roy Memorial Library. They have been invited to leave each of those locations—some more than once.

Finally, Roy Lee Roy gave the old boys a retired caboose for their permanent meeting place. Standing on the storage track behind the big rotary snow blower, the caboose is convenient to the Rip Track Tap with its ample supply of Schexnaydor longnecks, pickled eggs, and mutton jerky.

The Planning Commission has no agenda and no minutes are taken. As a result, issues are frequently discussed and analyzed several times in a single week—usually with different outcomes.

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Dreamer Klaus Pringle left the Black Forest of Bavaria, crossed the Atlantic, and found himself sitting on a trunk in nineteenth-century Grindle, Indiana.

Pringle was a toy maker, and went to work making wagons, dollhouses, tops, blocks, and wondrous whirligigs.

It was the whirligigs that caught the fancy and fueled the imagination of child and toy maker alike.

Pinwheels and garden novelties fired the creative juices and Klaus Pringle went on to develop and perfect the pre-eminent industrial and agricultural windmill.

Pringle Peerless Windmills pumped water to feed the locomotives of the nation’s railroads, water the herds of great plains cattle, and churn the butter in the most modern of farms.

Klaus Pringle became the king of windmills, passing his vision and position to son Karl Franz, who built himself a home to match. Patterned after mad King Ludwig’s castle, the amazing structure boasted a Pringle Peerless Windmill on each of its turrets and towers. Wind pumped the water, turned the kitchen spit, washed the clothes, and even powered an elevator, which never seemed able to decide whether to go up or down.

Rural electrification dealt a body blow to the windmill industry.

Today only a handful of Pringle Peerless mills are made each year—most to fill the needs of discriminating Amish. The sprawling, formerly frenetic Pringle Windworks is now largely moribund, except for a steady stream of spinning garden sunflowers, flying ducks, and chopping woodmen.

Cal Pringle, great, great grandson of Klaus, spends his days as director of operations for the Ersatz & Moot Point Railway’s Home Division. His days are filled with the intricacies of moving freight and passengers to myriad cities in three states. But after clocking out, Cal drives to the old Moot Point, Indiana, Windworks and watches the sun set while dreaming of a world filled not with wind-powered dishwashers, food processors, vacuum cleaners, wristwatches, and garden cultivators, but with fields of stately wind-turbines.

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Jawn Henry Jawn Henry Porter was the oilman in the Ersatz & Moot Point Grindle, Indiana, classification yards. He spent each day filling the reservoirs of the switch lamps with kerosene, trimming the wicks, and the lighting the lamps at dusk. It was an important, if seemingly menial job, and he performed his duties with purpose.

Jawn Henry loved the railroad, but invested in the American dream.

His son would not be a railroader. Jawn Henry Porter’s son would be a professional.

When Autumn Henry delivered a fine baby boy, Jawn took the first step to realizing his dream. The baby would be Jean Henri Porter, and he would rise above freight yards and coal dust, diesel fumes and a time clock.

Jean Henri was given every advantage. Classical music was played in the small Porter home. Lithographs of important paintings were thumb tacked to the walls of Jean Henri’s room, and an impressive new set of the Britannica Junior was placed on the bookcase by his bed.

Jean Henri was valedictorian of his class at Grindle Consolidated High and enrolled at the state university in neighboring Illinois. In just six years he returned to Grindle, Indiana, with a law degree and license to practice in four states.

The precocious young Porter joined the E&MP, eventually rising to chief legal counsel. Through all the years of diligently serving the railway, protecting and defending its interests, Jean Henri felt something missing. He wanted to be not behind a great mahogany desk, but riding the rails in a great silver coach.

The day he qualified for retirement, Jean Henri packed his belongings in a carton, left his office, and walked to the personnel department to apply for a job as porter on the specials taking winter fun-seekers to the Witch’s Kiss Ski Resort.

In time Jean Henri Porter again retired from the Ersatz & Moot Point, not as lawyer or porter, but as conductor of the Silver Salamander.

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Bass Hit Lamar and Olivia White met while singing in the Beulah AME choir. They married, and in time were blessed with two beautiful children.

From birth, Rex and Regina White were immersed in the gospel music tradition. By the time the two children entered their teens they were accomplished gospel singers and musicians, and it was only natural that Ersatz & Moot Point Railway brakeman Lamar and E&MP director of purchasing OIivia should form a family gospel group—The Gospel Streamliners.

With Olivia on Hammond B-3, Lamar on guitar, and Rex playing drums, it came as no surprise that Regina picked the bass guitar as her instrument of choice.

Too proud to ask her parents for an instrument, and unable to earn the money required to purchase one, Regina set about the construction of a bass guitar in the Grindle Consolidated High School woodworking shop. Fashioning the body from maple flooring saved from the renewal of lanes three and four at the Conn Cave Bowl, the neck, strings, and tuning hardware from a derelict Chickering upright piano, and the pickups from materials salvaged from old rotary dial telephones, she created an instrument.

Odd in shape and peculiar in tone, the home-made guitar raised eyes and opened ears. But no matter how unusual the instrument, all could see and feel the emotion, the talent—the gift that was Regina White’s.

Spontaneously, and without the White family’s knowledge, the congregation held bake sales, car washes, and dinners, raising the money to buy Regina a real bass guitar. Now she slaps, she strokes, she bends notes, she picks, plucks, and even bows the bass from Beulah AME. The world knows the work of James Cleveland, the Dixie Hummingbirds, the Mighty Clouds of Joy, and the Swan Silvertones. Grindle, Indiana, knows Regina White.

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Madam Walker The big news of 1957 was the successful launch of Sputnik, a Russian satellite, into Earth orbit. Lenore Chumley, Grindle Consolidated’s veteran third grade teacher, tried to illustrate the immense distances of space travel. She stated that the almost-239,000-mile trip from Earth to the moon was the equivalent of walking from the Grindle Civic Building to the Great Salamander Mound of Moot Point by way of the Great Switchback, and back, a distance of thirty-two and three-quarter miles, every day for twenty years.

Lenore Chumley became obsessed with her own analogy. She retired the following June and began a twentyyear hike to the moon. Weather conditions were immaterial. Heat, cold, rain, snow, wind, and ice made no difference. Lenore Chumley never missed a day. The sight of Chumley striding purposefully along the roadside became an expected part of any trip on Rt. 18.

In May of 1977, Lenore Chumley reached the moon, but the daily hikes continued.

In the capital, citizens speak proudly of a young black woman of the early 1900s, who by formulating, manufacturing, and marketing cosmetics specifically for other black women, became the nation’s first female Afro­American millionaire. She is known in Indianapolis as Madam Walker.

Grindle, Indiana, is also proud of Madam Walker, but they know her as the retired schoolteacher who walked to the moon.

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PA R T I I I

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Now Ewe Know In late December 1890, Cincinnati soap-maker Procter & Gamble had several railway stock cars filled with live turkeys delivered to the still-new Ivorydale manufacturing plant. The turkeys were to be distributed to the company employees as Christmas gifts, eventually to become a major portion of the yule feast. There is no record of the havoc created when hundreds of Procter workers, live turkey under arm, climbed aboard streetcars for the ride home. There is, however, record of the gift turkeys in Cincinnati inspiring an ill-conceived copy-cat event in Grindle, Indiana.

The winter of 1930 found the country in a deepening depression, and there was little joy in the air. Businesses, including the Ewenique Packing Company of Koontz Lake, were shuttering their doors. Lamb and mutton were too pricey for the unemployed. The Ersatz & Moot Point Railway learned of the loss of a favored client when they tried to deliver two cars of sheep, fattened for slaughter, to the Ewenique loading dock, only to find the building cold, dark, padlocked, and bearing a crude sign reading, “Closed For No Business.”

The railway was now burdened with 200 food-grade sheep. Roy Lee Roy V had a flash of inspiration. He had heard of the Procter & Gamble Christmas turkeys, and knew if a 12-pound turkey was good, a 150-pound sheep was better. Christmas was mere days away and although Roy remembered the story of the turkeys, he had forgotten the tale of the railroad’s previous attempt at holiday distribution of all things sheep. To quote American philosopher Yogi Berra, it was “Déjà vu all over again.”

The cars with their unshorn occupants were brought back to Grindle, and spotted on the yard track in front of the big rotary snowblower. A half dozen reluctant yard-workers received brief instruction in animal husbandry and given the responsibility of keeping the sheep watered, fed, and healthy, if not happy, for the ten days till Christmas.

The unlucky men given sheep duty became the butts of jokes made by their luckier counterparts. Mucking the cars along with the feeding and watering was demeaning and unprofessional for men trained to work with iron horses. There was no joy in the crew of caretakers.

The Friday before Christmas, the shepherds gathered in the Rip Track Café and worked on drowning their displeasure and annoyance with mug after frosty mug of Schexnaydor. From the window by the pool table they could see outlines of the sheep cars, and temptation lubricated by beer overcame corporate responsibility.

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The men left the café, crossed to the offending railcars, opened the big sliding doors and noisily woke the sheep. In less than five minutes the cars were empty and two hundred sheep were streaming down the freight platform ramp and off to parts unknown.

The escape went unreported to management until Monday morning. Although more than thirty yard-workers, most present at the Rip Track the previous Friday, were questioned, none could supply any information. There were rumors that rambunctious young recruits from Fort Norbert Pflem on their first leave, had done the deed. The fort’s commandant assured the railway that none of their men were on leave and suggested the perpetrators were from Plymouth, Logansport, or Peru.

With no solution in sight, life returned to normal. The yard-workers quit grousing. The fragrant stock cars were moved to a distant track. The employees, almost to a man and woman, expressed relief at not having to slaughter, butcher, and roast Christmas dinner.

Roy Lee Roy sent search parties to round up the scattered flock, but the search parties limited their work to the warm and friendly confines of the Rip Track. Nobody actually wanted a Christmas sheep. Retrieving the animals would have posed little challenge. They had become a community and soon found permanent residence with the historic flock on the Great Salamander Mound.

The mound was a comfortable home and the herd thrived, multiplied, and threatened to overwhelm the ancient earthworks. In response, Ersatz County became the only Hoosier jurisdiction to have a sheep season. Hunters came from as far as Valparaiso to take their limit of feral sheep. The tourist industry rose dramatically.

As time passed lamb and mutton became the favored red meats in Ersatz County. In the 1980s, lamb chops, lamb stew, mutton pie, and pulled mutton became Ersatz cuisine. “Three Thumbs” Francis, proprietor of the Mixing Bowl Grill, gained national fame when featured on a Food Network show preparing his signature lamb goetta. There were rumors that the Roys were investing in a Lamborghini dealership.

For more than six decades the feral sheep of Ersatz County were a benign flock, but in September of 1998 something snapped. The sheep became restless and aggressive. Brother Earnest B. Dough of the Brother Earnest B. Dough Bijou Full Immersion Tabernacle and Kosher Espresso Bar saw opportunity and bought time on WWEMP to broadcast an appeal.

“As I have warned the Godless and scoffing citizens of this city so many times, the end of life on Earth is drawing near. These are the end times. The evidence is in full view! It is not by chance that our poor town

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is over-run by sheep. These beasts are not harmless pets. These animals are Satan’s angels, here to lead us to his fiery kingdom. Deliver yourself from the grip of demons and into the saving grace of overwhelming peace. I will hold additional services each and every night at the newly completed Brother Earnest B. Dough Tabernacle of the Redundant Tithe until this menace from hell is subdued. Visa, MasterCard, and Discover cards accepted at all services.”

The crisis peaked during the annual Miss Schexnaydor Pageant.

Roy Memorial Hall was filled. The audience was anxious and legendary WWEMP senior announcer Omie Jones, wearing his gold lame tux, was ensconced in the broadcast booth. The mighty organ roared forth the first chorus of “Here She Comes, Miss Schexnaydor” and the contestants filed down the runway. The pageant was going like clockwork until Omie Jones announced in a startled voice, “A sheep! . . . and another sheep . . . they’re bursting in through the auditorium doors. They’re in the balcony . . . on the stage . . . they’ve engulfed the grand stairway . . . it’s falling to the stage floor, and the runway, and the orchestra. It’s terrible. This is one of the worst catastrophes. The bahs and bleating are rising into the air. It’s a terrific noise, ladies and gentlemen.

The stairs are crashing—the runway is crashing. Oh, the humanity! And the screaming. This is terrible—this is the worst thing I’ve ever witnessed.”

Amazingly by daybreak the sheep had returned in peace to Salamander Mound. There were no injuries, and several months later Omie Jones received a regional Emmy for “reporting under duress.”

Bambi Roy, wife of Roy Lee Roy VII, and a former Miss Schexnaydor herself, was inspired to write a poem.

I count sheep at night.

1, 2, 3.

As I lie in bed.

17, 18, 19.

Friendly black-nosed faces.

53, 54, 55.

Warm, white and wooly.

92, 93, 94.

Like four-legged fluffy clouds.

136, 137, 138.

Eating breakfast from my garden.

161, 162, 163.

Where are Little Bo Peep and Little Boy Blue?

And what are they doing?

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The Collector Yokel Pfinster was one of the last surviving railroad crossing guards on the Ersatz & Moot Point. Automatic flashing lights and gates guarded all of the line’s important grade crossings by the end of the Korean conflict, but a promise to Grindle Council that the crossing over Formerly Rt. 129 would receive 24/7/365 human protection through the lifetime of already-elderly Lucretia Grindle Roy provided tenuous job security for four men.

Yokel was fresh out of Grindle Consolidated and looked forward to the three-mile walk to work each morning.

One garbage day, two years into Yokel’s assignment at the crossing, he became aware of the rich diversity of detritus left by residents for collection, dumping, and eventual compaction in the Ersatz County landfill. The thought of all the retired push lawn mowers, two-wheeled tricycles, and three-legged chairs going to oblivion disturbed him.

Pfinster gathered and carried as much cast-off material as he could, dragging it first to work at the grade crossing, and then three miles home. This went on for weeks, and soon the Pfinster family garage and yard were piled high with stuff.

Yokel realized he couldn’t just collect stuff. He needed to redistribute it. Yokel lettered a sign, staked it in front of his house near the road, and opened for business. May 16, 1967, Yokel Pfinster invited the world to Pfinster’s Nearly Good Shoppe. Unique in commerce, even in Grindle, Indiana, Pfinster sells nearly anything, but everything with some flaw.

Through the years Yokel has adopted many marketing and sales strategies including free gift-wrap in December, a bridal registry, and Christmas gifts by the pound.

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Charmaine For nearly a century, Charmaine’s House of Heavenly Pleasure quietly filled the needs, both private and public, of Grindle, Indiana’s, populace. Housed in a magnificent Victorian frame mansion, Charmaine’s welcomed all comers, regardless of race, creed, or political persuasion. The Pleasure Palace was a living testimony to America as the great melting pot.

Over a span of ninety-plus years there were nearly a dozen Charmaines, each with a firm grasp of three nonnegotiable rules of operation. Full value must be delivered to each client on every visit. Discretion must be absolute. The community as a whole must be served.

No customer ever had a complaint. No tales were ever told, no client names were ever divulged, and great good came to the city in the form of many and significant gifts from an anonymous donor who was generally acknowledged to be Charmaine.

On a bright May afternoon in 1974, a novice bartender produced his first Brandy Alexander and coincidently a five-alarm fire, which reduced the stately brothel to a cellar hole full of ash.

There were no injuries, but the savvy Charmaine chose not to rebuild and reopen. A decade of pop culture espousing free love coupled with employee demands for retirement benefits, a dental plan, and double time for Sundays and holidays, had taken the joy out of business.

Charmaine studied for the Indiana State Realtor exam, passed, and opened Charmaine’s Red Light Realty.

Her clients, both past and present, attest to the truth of her motto, “A great house makes the best home!”

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Butch Remle April 17, 1955, was an important day in the life of Butch Remle. It was his sixteenth birthday, and he was old enough to drive a car, drop out of school, and seek his fortune. At 8 a.m. Remle entered the principal’s office at Grindle Elementary School, announced he was leaving, cleaned out his desk in Bernice Schwartz’s third grade room, and walked to Schexnaydor Field.

Going directly to the dugout, Butch approached Coach “Plug” Williams and asked how he could get a job with the Grindle Griffons.

Williams, who had been wrestling with the challenge of fielding a nine-man team for an afternoon game with the Koontz Lake Marmots, when only eight able­bodied Griffons were available, saw salvation in the form of Butch Remle. Within minutes, the boy who had hoped for a job as equipment manager or bat-boy, was signed to a contract, fitted with a uniform, and in the starting line-up.

Butch Remle has been a part of every Grindle Griffons game ever since.

In 1963 Remle was called up to the show. The entire Toledo Mud Hens team was on the disabled list dealing, as best as possible, with Kaopectate-resistant dysentery.

Two days later Butch was back with the Griffons.

In 1966 Butch Remle was named Grindle Griffons’ player-manager.

Remle’s math skills are limited to concepts like: three balls, four strikes, nine players, and nine innings. Butch seldom writes more than the game line-up or reads anything beyond the scoreboard and its surrounding advertising signs for Schexnaydor Beer, Grindle Gravel, Amish Kingdom, and goetta any time at the Mixing Bowl. Runs batted in, ERAs, multiyear back or front-loaded contracts with incentives and perks all seem unnecessarily complicated. Butch Remle says baseball is simple: “You’ve got a bat and a ball. You swing the bat. You hit the ball. You run.”

After forty years Butch is still the first one to the clubhouse each day, and still excited about every game the Griffons play. After forty years, Butch Remie still believes that each new day is the one he’ll get the phone call from Toledo.

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The Sand Patch The aristocracy of Grindle, Indiana, celebrated Independence Day 1851 in an epic poker game at the OneEyed Jack. The participants shared a shortage of ready cash and a surplus of Ersatz County real estate. As the game progressed, major portions of Ersatz County changed hands two, three, four, even six times as lady luck called the shots.

After seventeen hours the game finally folded and the players tallied their winnings. Morley Grindle, Roy Lee Roy, and Ludwig Schexnaydor were all considered winners with desirable land holdings. Shadrack “Shady” Day was the universally acknowledged loser. He left the table with title to an area derisively referred to as the sand patch.

The sand patch was an area roughly one and one-half miles long and up to three quarters of a mile wide, seemingly gouged out of the native limestone and filled with fine, clean sand. In the Grindle, Indiana, of 1851, there was no market for sand, clean or otherwise.

With the building of the Ersatz & Moot Point Railway, sand was suddenly a needed commodity. Locomotives could not negotiate the grades of Ersatz County without the traction afforded by sand between the steel wheels and tracks. Shadrack Day’s ship had come in—in the form of a steam locomotive.

More than a century later, the sand patch still supplies all of the sand needed in Ersatz County, and the surrounding limestone provides aggregate for the area’s construction. Sandy and Rocky Day, Shady’s heirs, run the operation.

Sandy Day has been called the Martha Stewart of gravel for her vision to market sand and gravel products to home owners in five- and ten-pound designer packages. It was also Sandy Day who introduced the American heartland to the Grit of the Month Club.

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The Rip Track In the early nineteenth century, eighteen hardy families settled in what was to become Ersatz County, Indiana, carving homes and farms from the rugged Hoosier Anomaly. Custis Snell was unique among the group.

When the wheels fell off his wagon, he expressed no disappointment in his destination and no reservations about his new home. Within hours he had fashioned planks and hardware salvaged from his wagon into a crude bar and was serving his fellow travelers from the stock of spirits he had brought with him.

Snells have been Ersatz County tavern-keepers ever since. First in the One-Eyed Jack, and later in the Rip Track Cafe, a long line of Snell heirs has done well by following the practices of Custis: a good drink for a fair price and buy low, sell fair.

Current Rip Track owner Thelma Snell is the most recent practitioner of the family creed. A Snell by marriage, Thelma took over the Rip Track when husband Tom Sr. was reported missing in action by his reserve outfit during summer maneuvers at nearby Fort Norbert Pflem. Thelma accepted her loss and threw herself into the operation of the family business.

At Easter of 1988, Thelma realized that children universally loved to hunt for colored, hard-boiled eggs, and without exception refused to eat the things. In true Snell tradition she offered to buy any child’s horde of eggs for a nickel each; she pickled the take and sold the result to her Rip Track regulars for a quarter.

The ensuing years have made the annual Easter egg buy-back the premier Ersatz children’s spring event and has sealed Thelma’s reputation as one who buys low and sells fair.

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Tommy Snell Heart is a term usually employed to describe an athletic team or competitor performing with courage, endurance, and producing results beyond the expected. In November 1997 the Grindle Post-Leader used “heart” to describe the occurrence of the Grindle Consolidated High School Fighting Salamander basketball team taking the floor in the first game of the new season.

A comment that outsiders would consider snide and belittling was appreciated as praise and a kind of journalistic badge of courage and stamp of approval by the loyal Grindle fans. The ’Manders were consistently the poorest team in the district and only once in a quarter century achieved a .250 season.

1997 was to be different—the team did have “heart.”

At the end of that first 1997 game, the ’Manders were just one game away from .500. That margin was a constant through the entire amazing, unbelievable, unforgettable season.

On a snowy February Saturday night, the season ended. With seconds left in regulation play, the ’Manders were in a 48-48 tie with the Veedersburg Varmints. A field goal for the Salamanders would bring victory for the game and Grindle’s first .500 season ever.

Jasper Fluke stole the ball from Veedersburg’s Tony Woody and passed it to Salamander star center Tommy Snell. Snell judged the distance to the basket and lobbed the ball.

Time seemed to slow as the ball described an arc to the distant hoop, a beautifully curved crescent that sadly was headed in the wrong direction. As the final buzzer sounded, Snell’s long shot dropped silently through the rim of the Varmints’ basket, giving Veedersburg the winning goal and leaving the Salamanders in the now accustomed position of one game away from .500.

While the Veedersburg Bugle-Intelligencer credited the Varmints’ victory to Snell’s “bonehead” play, the Grindle fans considered Tommy Snell a hero, and retired his number—18.

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Buster “Outfall” Fletcher Returning from a low volume flush mechanism seminar in Chicago, Grindle, Indiana, master plumber Buster “Outfall” Fletcher stopped for coffee and a bacon, lettuce, and sauerkraut sandwich in Elkhart. Next door to the lunch counter, “Outfall” found a surplus store, its shelves and bins filled with valves, mouthpieces, and tubing—remains of that city’s once-thriving band instrument manufacturing heritage.

For ten dollars Fletcher got enough miscellaneous parts to fill his truck.

Even while driving, Fletcher’s impatient mind and fertile imagination were racing with schemes for the world’s first self-actuating, vacuum-breaking anti-backflow water key and a non-invasive, multi-tasking, freeze-proof tuning slide flapper valve. There were concepts for whole families of instruments never before dreamed.

Grindle’s drains remained plugged and toilets were left un-plunged as Buster, armed with a blow-torch, flux, solder, and his treasure-trove of instrument parts, crafted and grafted a growing collection of musical hybrids.

First came the double reed, bass euphonium, then the solar-powered glockenspiel, the phrygian, soprano, slide tuba, the mixolydian eight-valve rhythm cornet, and eventually the bi-belled, e-flat alto, septe-valve kuglehorn.

The kuglehom received special mention in Rail lndustry Digest for its unique four-chime steam whistle and a Flame of the Future Award from the Indiana Association of Fire Chiefs for the horn’s self-contained sprinkler system.

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Davinci Glen Ruggles signed onto the Grindle, Indiana, Sanitation Department. Investing a long, hot, fragrant summer in emptying thirty-two-gallon galvanized steel trashcans into the city’s Heil trash packers left Ruggles with a yearning for something more. Glen Ruggles craved creative fulfillment.

One morning a dog-eared book tumbled off the top of a can and onto the pavement. Ruggles stooped, picked up the volume, and rather than tossing it into the packer, slipped it into his pocket. That day at lunch Glen Ruggles began reading Composition and Color—An Introduction to the Theory and Psychology of the Elements of Art. Ruggles read the book, not once, but over and over and over.

His conversation shifted from bowling scores and batting averages to hue, value, negative space, texture, and congruence of line.

The rest of the sanitation crew called him Davinci.

On October 1, 1993, Glen Ruggles was reassigned to the Grindle, Indiana, Department of Roads and Streets.

There he was equipped with a red wagon, broom, scoop shovel, four-inch brush, empty Schexnaydor case, gallons of traffic yellow paint, and given the task of maintaining the yellow curbs signifying no parking.

Glen Ruggles was in his métier.

Stretching for something beyond curb warnings and lane lines, and inspired by the now-classic black silhouette of a leaping stag to warn of roaming deer, Ruggles created the black graphic representing Ersatz County’s burgeoning population of feral sheep.

The sign with the leaping sheep remains unique to Ersatz County.

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Grindle Exotica Ordinary even by Ersatz County standards, Sue Schaumeffel lives in one of 318 identical homes in Pullman Estates. She spends her days clerking in the County Recorder’s Office and nights watching television in her small living room. Sue Schaumleffel’s single brush with excitement is a weekly trip each Thursday night to the Moxitoxic Nation’s nearby high-stakes bingo hall. Her stated intention: To win the big pot, build a pool in the diminutive back yard of her tract house, and spend the summer floating in the sun sipping a tall drink garnished with fruit and a small paper umbrella.

June 11, 1998, Sue entered the big hall, bought her usual three cards per game and began play. In the fourth game, at the call of N-18, Sue bingoed and took home the smallest jackpot ever awarded in Moxitoxic history—$87.18.

Flush with the excitement of sudden wealth, Sue peeled off a ten and a five for bingo-caller Best Foot Forward, son and successor to the most recent Chief Mellow Fellow and wife Lame Deer Dancing. She then proceeded to Acme Emporium, purchasing an eight-by-ten-foot plastic inflatable pool for $30, a power inflator for $22 and a clear plastic raft for $6.99. She spent the remaining $13.19 on rum, fruit punch, lemon soda, oranges, lemons, and a packet of small paper umbrellas.

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Scholarly Assessment Ersatz County, Indiana, is so universally ignored by the scholars and citizens of the ninety-two sister counties that it is only occasionally referenced in print, and then, merely in the veiled and euphemistic phrase, Hoosier Anomaly.

Ersatz & Moot Point Railway president Roy Lee Roy, with a handful of the county’s culturally elite, maintain a certain perverse pride in their home and frequently bemoan its lack of recognition. This small group of Ersatz literati made it the goal of the local chapter of the Kin Hubbard Society to commission a respected historian to visit, view, experience, and record the life and social fabric of Ersatz County.

Letters were written and mailed and finally a single reply arrived in Grindle. Kent Owen, Orator in Residence of the Monroe County Classical Institute’s Perry Township Branch, would travel north to assess the relative merits of the project.

Owen arrived, lived as a guest of the Roy’s in imposing Roy Manor, dined on goetta at the Mixing Bowl, walked the Great Salamander Mound of Moot Point, rode the lift at the Witch’s Kiss Ski Resort, shot a game of 7-pocket at the Rip Track, and sidestepped the leavings of Ersatz County’s trademark feral sheep.

After almost an hour’s reflection over more than a few mugs of Schexnaydor Stout, Owen announced to the assembled Hubbard Society that this was a project for which he had no stomach. It was, he said, something best suited for the writers’ circle of the Indiana Home for the Bewildered, the single state facility operating within the Ersatz corporate boundary.

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Smell of Success In a county accustomed to the backhand of good fortune, the town of Ersatz holds special significance for insignificance. Envisioned as the county seat, Ersatz was established at the mysterious bubbling spring that feeds Stinking Creek. The odor that gave the creek its name soon proved the undoing of the brave hamlet, and county government fled to neighboring Grindle. While Grindle also lies astride Stinking Creek, the odor completely dissipates less than five miles from hapless Ersatz.

Ersatz struggled on for generations, inhabited by families that shared a genetic olfactory deficiency.

Maintaining its own one-room school into the 1950s, Ersatz never had enough students in a grade level to field any sort of sports team. Twice (once in 1906 and again in 1907) the town achieved some small measure of recognition when Dumpling Darling competed for and won the Girl’s State Medal for Shot Put. After graduating from the Ersatz School, Dumpling toured the country for many years as a part of Walton’s Circus.

In the circus, Dumpling would enter a boxing ring and “wrassle” one of the show’s bears.

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RT 129 . . . Formerly Grindle, Indiana, is a city at a crossroads. Typical of hundreds of Midwest towns, it grew from a handful of homes and shops along two intersecting roads. A simple grid of streets and alleys eventually became a city.

Grindle was comfortable anchored at the intersection of Routes 18 and 129, until a junior cartographer in Indianapolis discovered there was a second Route 129 near Terre Haute in the southwest quadrant of the state.

To avoid confusion, the state highway department declared that the Route 129 bisecting Grindle, would lose its redundant number. The bureaucratic minds that invalidated Grindle’s Route 129 failed to assign an alternative identifier.

In a moment of impromptu genius, the Indiana Department of Transportation elected to save the cost of replacing the large and expensive Route 129 signs by adding a small and economical explanatory panel reading, “FORMERLY.”

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The Queen Prom queens, homecoming courts, and county fair royalty are still respected honors in the Hoosier heartland.

In Ersatz County, Indiana, the most prestigious position for any young woman to achieve is Goetta Queen.

Grindle, Indiana, is a city ruled by tradition. The rule of tradition is so strong that even the traditions have traditions.

Since the inception of the Goetta Queen in 1917, the honor has been given to every single female member of the Hempfling family as she reached the age to qualify. Dozens of tiaras and scepters fill the walls of the trophy room in the magnificent family home, providing graphic proof that this is a line of blue bloods—an aristocracy of note.

1997 was the year for Bertine Hempfling to make her run at the honor. Bertine did not assume that she was a sure thing. The honor of Goetta Queen was hotly contested and the competition would be fierce. Bertine Hempfling prepared for the contest like an athlete conditioning and training for a major event. Her daily schedule was filled with exercises designed to win her the coveted crown.

She played checkers with elderly vets, made crafts with residents of the State Home for the Bewildered, took diction and deportment lessons, and always behaved with decorum. Bertine Hempfling would not be denied her heritage.

On June 29, 1997, Bertine and eleven young Ersatz women stood in the bright lights on the stage built for the event in Roy Coliseum, modeled their gowns, performed their talent, and answered the questions of the judges. There were no clear leaders until the final question was asked, and Bertine replied, “I dream of a time, and will work for the day, when I know that no Ersatz child need ever go to bed without goetta.�

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Four Putt Leo “Four Putt” Kappelhoff is a born hustler. Son of an Ersatz & Moot Point switch tender, Leo spent his childhood in the rough surrounding Salamander Run’s famous seventeen holes collecting golf balls lost by the club’s elite and then selling them back to the original owners at the end of the round.

Kappelhoff had a natural instinct for the game. He could sense whether a player was about to hook, slice, or send the ball straight down the fairway. He could even prejudge how far the ball would fly.

Leo Kappelhoff became a caddy at the club, learned the game himself, and dreamed of becoming a pro. With scant resources for training, Leo asked advice of the elders he caddied for. Gravel baron Stormy Day using a line he frequently heard on television football broadcasts said, “Study the film.”

Confused, but determined, Kappelhoff set off to study the film. The only pertinent film available was a scratchy print of W.C. Fields in the Golf Specialist and a compilation of classic scenes from the Three Stooges.

By end of summer, Leo Kappelhoff had a distinctive and offbeat style that produced stunning results.

In June of 1989, young Kappelhoff registered and played in the eighteenth Annual Amish Open held at Guernsey Fields. Despite the task of playing a full eighteen holes, rather than the accustomed seventeen of his home course Salamander Run, Leo persevered, eventually winning the tournament with his fourth putt on the final hole.

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The Projectionist In September of 1970, Merton Roy entered Grindle Consolidated High School as a freshman. Within days he had joined the Projectionist Club and by Thanksgiving was its youngest-ever president.

Roy retained the club presidency through graduation, entertaining graduates, parents, and guests with an eight-minute, black-and-white feature on bicycle safety as part of the year’s commencement exercise.

Big brother and Ersatz & Moot Point Railway president Roy Lee Roy appointed the new graduate director of safety education.

Equipped with a classroom and movie theatre built into a retired baggage car, Merton spent his days traveling the rails of the E&MP showing fellow employees 16-millimeter epics exhorting the frequently dozing audiences to lift with their knees, wear steel-toed shoes, and stay alert.

Mert was in heaven.

When large-screen color televisions and video tape players pushed film and projectors out of the classroom, Merton bought the Grindle Board of Education’s stock of projectors and films and began a community service project of exhibiting his collection to Grindle’s poor and elderly.

Every Saturday afternoon finds Merton enthusiastically sharing cinematic treasures with dozens of napping seniors.

Each year on the first Saturday following the Fourth of July, Merton presents the entire eighteen-hour series: Our Proud Nation—These Forty-Eight Great United States.

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Deaf Boy Dugan Earlyn Dugan was born a normal, bright, and responsive child, but at age two he somehow wandered into the boiler of a locomotive under repair in the Ersatz & Moot Point back shop, where his father worked. While inside the huge iron boiler, the toddler lay down and fell asleep. During the child’s nap the shopworkers came back from break and resumed the task of riveting new plates to the great iron cylinder.

Earlyn slept right through the riveting, eventually awoke, and emerged from the massive boiler smiling and profoundly deaf.

What some would consider a handicap was not to be a hindrance to Earlyn. He acquired an old Gibson flat top guitar, taught himself to play, and learned the body of American blues music.

For a quarter of a century he has entertained the patrons of the Eleventh Pin Lounge with his most personal style of the blues.

Critics and commentators talk of Earlyn “Deaf Boy” Dugan’s unique tunings, his quirky pronunciation, unusual intonation, offbeat chording, and puzzling harmonic structure, but all agree that no other performer makes an audience experience the blues like “Deaf Boy” Dugan.

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Ms. Redneck On February 9, 1971, Ramona Watts became the first baby born in the new maternity wing at Grindle, Indiana’s, Roy Memorial Hospital. Ramona’s father, Bernie, was an “all-around” master machinist with the Ersatz & Moot Point Railway. As Bernie leaned over to admire the beautiful little girl he and wife Phay had created, a dial caliper slipped from his shirt pocket and into the baby’s open hand.

Ramona closed her tiny fingers around the precision measuring instrument. It was still firmly in her grasp two days later as mother and baby left the hospital for home.

From the beginning, tools were Ramona’s favorite toys. On the first day of school, Kindergarten teacher Bessie Mays was astounded to find Ramona measuring the diameter of a Binney & Smith Leaf Green crayon to the 1,000th of an inch with a Starrett micrometer.

After graduation from Grindle Consolidated, Ramona went on to study at the big university in Lafayette. Four years later with degree in hand Ms. Watts returned to Grindle and a job in research and development for the Redneck Tool Company.

Never satisfied with the status quo, Ramona pushed the envelope of tool design, developing Redneck’s revolutionary line of metric adjustable wrenches, slip-joint pliers, and straight-blade screw drivers. Looking for additional challenge she went on to conceive, create, and patent the world’s first left-handed, metric, ratcheting claw hammer. All of this was done without fanfare or self-aggrandizement When Redneck Tool’s advertising agency suggested that the model for the annual poster-calendar be taken from the company staff, everyone agreed—it was time for Ramona Watts to step forward and be seen.

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Sharing the Blame Few projects of import can be credited as the work of a single person. Certainly a seminal work recording 250 years of one obscure county’s history cannot have a sole perpetrator. This volume has many coconspirators, some willing, others by fate’s whim. I cannot allow these friends and fabricators to languish in the shadows. It is their time to enter the half-light of unlikely recognition.

Rosemary Schlachter has been there every inch of the way. Frequently nodding in acceptance, reliably smiling at a twist of phrase, and always poised with red pencil at the ready.

Steve Rindsberg has been a grudging accomplice since day five. Steve is my IT guy. If there is a problem with my Smith Corona, he is of no help. My Lenovo is another thing altogether. If Steve weren’t enough, he brings additional firepower in the person of wife, Helen.

My friends at Robin Imaging have been steadfast. There are no better scans anywhere. Anywhere.

Bill Watts, now Dr. B. D. Watts, and William Martin lead me down the winding path of technical theatre, yeah theatre . . . not theater. They taught me design, set construction, set decoration, costuming, and lighting.

Russel Henderly was my seventh-grade print shop teacher. He gave me an eye for a beautiful printed page, taught me the difference between an en dash and an m quad, added the words quoins, quoin key, comp stick, and chase to my vocabulary, and ingrained my memory with the California Job Case—BCDEISFG, LMN, HOYPW (pronounced hoip). He also taught me fundamental darkroom techniques and put up with me a second year, in eighth grade metal shop, teaching fundamentals of welding.

Major props must be paid to Rob Levin and our Bookhouse Group friends. Despite all warnings they accepted this project, ignoring its impact on their corporate reputation.

Finally, it is beyond incumbent to thank the citizens of Ersatz County for their amazing willingness to step forward, issuing a sort of civic, “Yuhp, we’re here.”

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What Others Say . . .

“Schlachter’s scholarship is impressive. While some would describe him as a nitpicker, one cannot argue that his nits are inerrantly well-picked. Be assured that the author leaves no “t” uncrossed, no “j” undotted.

The resulting testament to things ersatz is nothing less than moot.”

Horace Greenlee—Valparaiso Codependent

“Appalling, shocking, degrading . . . an inexcusable affront to the patriotic citizens of Indiana’s real counties, the true lifeblood of Hoosierdom.”

Millicent Renfro, BS—Hoosier Heritage Defender

“If a little learning is a dangerous thing, one can barely imagine the horrors a surfeit of ersatz knowledge brings.”

Washington Willcox—Switzerland County Skeptic

“The people and places of Ersatz county . . . eminently unremarkable, but not without a certain lack of charm.”

Kent Owen, Editor Emeritus—The Springville Quarterly Review

“There is so much that has no need to be said. But there it is.”

James Olson—The Koontz Lake Retaliator

“Seldom noticed, Ersatz County was right there under our noses, waiting to be wiped away.”

Wilson Garber—Logansport Roundabout

“Schlachter exhibits knowledge, artistry, perseverance, and a sort of stubborn courage, but why?”

Randy Stone—Chicago Star

“In this era that gives us politicians railing against very real stories that they assail as fake news, one can’t but question the non-existence of the subjects, much less their milieu, of a fauxtodocumentary that openly purports to take as its subject the populace of a town not found on any map, in a county unacknowledged by the state of Indiana, in which it is ostensibly located as its subject. Could anything be further from the truth yet more real”?

Twark Main—The Fairview Teetotaller