Posey Magazine September/October 2011 by J. Bruce Baumann

September/October 2011

www.poseymagazine.com

–

A magazine for and about

Posey County, Indiana

September/October 2011

Cover story

Writer Linda Neal Reising reports on the Posey County WWII veteran who survived years in a Japanese prison camp, and then came back home to tell his story. We would all like to think of ourselves as survivors, but Claude Reynolds would be one of the folks at the top of any list. Reynolds will celebrate his 91st birthday in December. STORY BEGINS ON PAGE SIX © Photographed by J. Bruce Baumann

16 Posies/By Alison Baumann — Eat Your Flowers 20 Feathers/By Sharon Sorenson — Changing Seasons 24 I’m just sayin’ — Posey County Students “Picture Posey”

28 Goose Pond—A place of incredible beauty — By Michael Webster 36

Posey Then & Now

— A look back in time

Special thanks to the following for their help

Carol Lupfer, Joseph Poccia, Ernie Rapp, Kathy Riordan, Jerry Rutledge, Sue Wassmer

CORNBREAD

ack before cell phones and GPS devices and every other kind of electronic whizbang that connects drivers with the outside world, many cars were equipped with CB radios. If you had one hanging from your dash, you could ask other drivers for traffic information and you could get suggestions on which roadside restaurant was worth stopping for. About the only requirement was a way to identify yourself, a “handle” they called it. And mine was “Cornbread.” It was a family nickname that stretched back to my early childhood. And I came by it honestly. I grew up in a neighborhood surrounded by family —aunts, uncles and grandparents all living within a short stretch of my five-year-old legs. My mother caught me checking to find out who was serving cornbread and beans for supper before deciding where I wanted to eat that night. I truly loved cornbread — hot or cold, baked or fried. I loved it with a meal and I loved it as a snack. My maternal grandmother, a wonderful Kentucky cook, liked to snack on cold cornbread, crumbled in a glass, covered with buttermilk and eaten with a spoon. I wasn’t much for buttermilk; I preferred my crumbled cornbread with sweet milk (your family might have called it whole milk). My mother liked

hers with warm milk. But there was no such thing as the wrong kind of cornbread. Or so I thought. As I got older and occasionally ate away from home and/or family, I learned there was a lot of room for disagreement about cornbread. There was cornbread made with white cornmeal versus that made with yellow cornmeal. There was buttermilk or hot water cornbread. Some like it baked in a blackened cast-iron skillet and some prefer it fried. I didn’t much care; just call it cornbread and I’d be there. And then one day I discovered what seemed to me the strangest thing ever. I bit into what looked to be a perfectly browned cornmeal muffin, lightly buttered, and discovered that someone had made a terrible mistake. It was sweet. Don’t misunderstand me. I have a highly developed sweet tooth. I dearly love devil’s food cake, pineapple upside down cake, coconut cream pie and banana pudding. And I can eat pecan pie as long as the coffee keeps flowing. But keep the sugar bowl away from my cornbread batter. As Mark Twain famously said, “If God had meant cornbread to be sweet, he’d have called it cake.”

Now Twain was clearly a Southern man with a palate to match. He’s also been quoted as saying, “The North thinks it knows how to make cornbread, but this is a gross superstition. Perhaps no bread in the world is quite as good as Southern cornbread, and perhaps no bread in the world is quite as bad as the Northern imitation of it.” And even today, it’s the South that celebrates cornbread. The annual National Cornbread Festival takes place the last weekend in April in South Pittsburg, Tennessee. My mother used to tell me about how she had marked me for life while she was pregnant with me during the sweltering summer of 1946. It seems that money was tight since my dad was serving a tool and die apprenticeship after winning World War II. Corn was plentiful that summer and cheap —a dozen ears for a quarter. So they ate some form of corn for nearly every meal. I was going to be born either hating it or loving it. A few years ago, a friend bought me a book she had run across. Said she saw it and knew it had to belong to me. The title: “All I Ever Wanted Was a Piece of Cornbread and a Cadillac.” The Cadillac, you will notice, comes second in the title.

—Charlene Tolbert Contributing Editor Posey Magazine She can be contacted at: poseymagazine@aol.com

POSEY POSTCARD

Don’t wait for mistakes to be forgiven. Don’t wait for suffering to be consoled. Don’t wait for ardent joys to arrive. Peace with the old land: that’s all I want. —Y Nhi (Vietnamese poet)

Claude Reynolds and his sister, Sue Wassmer, catch up on the news of the day in downtown Poseyville.

ÂŠ Photographed by J. Bruce Baumann

By Linda Neal Reising

ith his white hair and red suspenders, ninety-year-old Arthur “Claude” Reynolds is an unlikely cheerleader, but with a little prompting, he will go into the chant: A bottle of pop, A big banana, We’re from Griffin, Indiana!

That’s a lie! That’s a bluff! We’re from Stewartsville! That’s the stuff! For three years, Claude and fellow cheerleader Fern Williams cheered on the Stewartsville High School Owls. Claude is still proud of the place where he was born: “I had a black sweater with an owl on the front of it. I had black trousers, and she [Fern] had a black skirt. One time we did one of them jumps and her skirt fell off. She had tights on, but I got accused of turning her skirt loose,” he exclaims with a tone of protest in his voice. Those carefree school days were soon traded for hard labor when Claude

Reynolds take his coffee at Haroldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Cafe almost every morning. Jim Tepool is also a regular â&#x20AC;&#x201D; together they solve the problems of the world.

graduated and went to work on the land where his father was employed as a tenant farmer. After a year, his Uncle Mac encouraged him to give up the farm life and join the Army. “He always came with a brand-new automobile, a Mercury or a Ford, one or the other. And I was drivin’ the bundle wagon, wheat thrashin’ time—hot, nasty, dirty, sweaty,” Claude remembers. “He’d drive up alongside me, he’d put his feet up on the dashboard, lean back, and holler at me, ‘Every day in the Army is like Sunday on a farm.’” Claude enlisted effective August 2, 1939. He was assigned to the Coast Artillery Battery for his recruit drill, then transferred to the Coast Artillery School detachment. There he went through communications school, studying basic communications, electricity, and harbor defense. When he graduated, he was promoted from PFC to Staff Sergeant, but with that promotion came the order to report to Fort Mills on Corregidor Island in the Philippines, a fortified island guarding the entrance to Manila Bay. Arriving in the Philippines near the end of February in 1941, Claude was first assigned to “D” Battery, 59th Coast Artillery. Soon he was reassigned to Headquarters Battery, Harbor Defense of Manila and Subic Bay, and put in charge of all permanently installed telephone communications, including those to the gun batteries on Corregidor. It was during this time that he met General Douglas MacArthur. “I saw him every day. He knew me, and he knew who I was, and he was cordial enough that he’d say ‘hi.’” During those brief encounters, Claude never imagined the news that General MacArthur would soon bring. “I was sleepin’ on a bench outside one night. General MacArthur came over and woke me up, and he said, ‘They’ve bombed Pearl Harbor, and I want someone to be on duty 24 hours a day now.’” However, the war did not become real to Claude until “I heard those first bombs come whistlin’ down.” The first barrage started as Claude and some of his fellow soldiers were walking across the parade grounds. From that time on, the bombing was

Reynolds makes his almost daily rounds, listening to old friends and trading stories.

Brother Joe Reynolds owns the H&R Pharmacy. This day, Joe explains something new that he’s added to the store to his older brother. fairly constant. On May 6, 1942, Corregidor surrendered. Before leaving with his family on a submarine, MacArthur gave Claude the order to destroy the communications equipment. “I took gasoline, poured it all over the switchboards and what have you, made a trail outside, threw a match in it, and boom!” To escape the shelling, Claude made

his way to Middle Side Tunnel, a tunnel that the Army Corps of Engineers had not entirely completed. “It was jam-crammed full of men, I mean everywhere. There was no semblance of order anywhere. It was chaos. People were laying down. You couldn’t hardly walk without steppin’ on somebody.” Claude had not been in the tunnel for many days when he saw “a lone Japanese soldier, just one man all by himself. It wasn’t

the whole squad or nothing like that, it was one man carrying a rifle. He didn’t even have it in his hand. He was dressed up in his army uniform and had leggings on and had his rifle on his shoulder and was saying Ohayo. That’s sayin’ Good morning, you know.” After coming out with their hands up, the men were taken first to the Middle Side barracks and then to a submarine mine warehouse near the water’s edge. Altogether,

Everyone in Poseyville knows Claude Reynolds, so a little help is always near. there were approximately 12,000 prisoners of war. From the 6th of May until he was transferred to Bilibid Prison in Manila on the 23rd, Claude survived on any food he could find, since the Japanese gave them no rations. When the men went out on work details, they scavenged canned food, flour, rice—anything they could find—and shared what they had. Through ingenuity and teamwork, many were able to survive. Claude was only in Bilibid Prison for a week before he was transferred to Cabanatuan via railcar. According to Claude, “They would load until it was standing room only, elbow to elbow. They didn’t close the doors,

but they had a guard at each door.” When the prisoners arrived, they were finally fed some rice. Cabanatuan Camp #3 would be Claude’s “home” until late October of 1942. At Cabanatuan, Claude saw what happened to prisoners who tried to escape. “Shortly after we got to Cabanatuan Camp #3, three American prisoners escaped but were caught and brought back to camp about twenty-four hours later. The Japanese guards ordered some of the POW’s to dig three holes, and three posts were set in the ground just outside of the holes. Each man’s hands were tied behind his back, and another line was attached to the pole above the man’s head. As long as you stood upright, no pressure was

applied. The men were positioned facing the sun, and it was early morning. After noon, they were turned around so as to continue facing the sun. I can still see one of the men who had passed out, hanging there limp, and of course, the pressure of his shoulders was extreme. At sundown, the men were removed from the poles and taken to three previously dug gravesites. A man stood in front of each hole, and a Japanese firing squad, five or six soldiers, shot all three at the same time. I do not recall anyone else trying to escape, at least not from any camp I was in.” Claude arrived at Tanagawa Camp No.1 in Japan on Thanksgiving Day, 1942. “Five hundred men got there in late

November, and some one hundred guys died within the first five or six months. They got there from the tropics, and it was wintertime, and they got pneumonia. They were feeding us three meals a day there, but not anything that you could really get fat on. As I recall, breakfast was a small bowl of rice; lunch and supper was another small bowl of rice and some watery soup which consisted of cut-up daikon and maybe sometimes a little greens of some kind.” When Claude was taken prisoner, he weighed about 165; after several months, he was down to 112. Claude stayed at Tanagawa until March 1945, working on dry docks for Japanese ships. “The Japanese tried to create competition among the prisoners by promising cigarettes or sometimes an extra rice ball for the most work done in a day,” Claude recalls, but eventually the men began working together to sabotage the project. None of the dry docks were completed. Claude was then sent to work in a carbon factory in Naruo for a month before being moved to Tsurugo to do stevedore work. “We handled soybeans just like we’d raise here. Looked just like them. Little yellow soybeans. The first one of those bags they put on me, I went flat with the bag on me, and I couldn’t get up.” Those soybeans would prove vital for Claude’s survival. The old Japanese man in charge of the operation ordered that the prisoners be fed soybeans three times a day to build up their strength. “A lot of people were so sick they couldn’t eat anything. I must have a cast iron gut because I ate every soybean I could get my hands on. I gained 20 pounds the first month, 20 pounds the second, and eight the third.” As 1945 wore on, the air raids at the camp became worse. The prisoners knew something had happened on August 6, when the guards hurried them back to camp from a work detail and told them to rest for the day, but they had no way of knowing that the first atomic bomb had been dropped on Japan. Finally, they forced an interpreter to tell them what was going on. “He said, ‘Some kind of terrible weapon destroyed the city. Don’t

let them people in the office know that I told you anything because they could cut my neck yet.’” At first, the prisoners didn’t know what to do. The gates to the camp were open, but there were still guards posted by them. Finally, some of the braver men, convinced that the war was truly over, decided to leave the camp. After several had walked through the gates and started down the street, one of the guards finally called out. “He said, ‘Where are you guys going?’ and somebody turned around and said, ‘None of your damn business!’ The guard just put his rifle on the rack and started walking down the road behind us,” says Claude with a chuckle. After that, the men came and went as they pleased. When they spotted a farmer using a bull to till his fields, the bargaining began. “We asked, ‘If we get you a horse, would you trade?’ He said yes.” So the Americans drove to the nearby military cavalry stable. “The guys saluted us, and an officer said, ‘What can I do for you?’ We said, ‘We want a horse.’ He asked, ‘What kind?’ We told him, ‘Draft.’ He said, ‘That horse has a harness assigned to it. You’d better take that, too.’ We traded that horse for the bull. Before the day was over, that bull was in the soup pot!” Soon, the Air Force started dropping food and clean uniforms on the camp. Then one day a United States captain and two enlisted men pulled up in their Jeep and announced that a train to Yokohama would be arriving that afternoon. Claude Reynolds’ three-and-a-half year ordeal was over. Through it all, Claude never once thought of giving up. “There was people who flat laid down and died. That’s what sheep does.” No one would ever accuse Claude Reynolds of being a sheep. A Posey County resident since 1980, Linda Neal Reising lives in the historic “Cale House,” where she writes fiction and poetry, as well as fending off rowdy raccoons and voracious Virginia creeper. She can be contacted at: poseymagazine@aol.com.

Reynolds lives on Pumpkin Run Road with a variety of creatures, including this peacock.

Poetry

Along Highway 69

Rows of tasseled corn stretch out in acres.

From here, the field looks like corduroy

trousers. The barn, a silver buckle

anchoring a chambray sky.

Something So Grand

I see them each morning on my drive into work — two sisters, aging fairies, still dressed in long night gowns, half hidden from view by sunflowers and roses. Coffee cups in hand, they stand barefoot and oblivious to the world. It always makes me a little sad to think I’m rushing away from something so grand.

(First published in Plain Spoke) —Jessica Thompson

Posey Portrait

Jim and Roger Yaggi, master plumbers

ÂŠ Photograph by J. Bruce Baumann

Posey Portrait will feature a random photograph of a friend or neighbor â&#x20AC;&#x201D; in a place we call home

Posies/By Alison Baumann

Don’t worry—I’m not going

to get all Euell Gibbonsy and tell you to go searching through the woods for mysterious plants whose only culinary recommendation is something scary like “No Known Toxicity.” Good Lord, I hope we’re not that hungry. No, you know where these plants are, because you put them there in the first place, and you’ve been lovingly weeding and watering and nurturing them all summer long. Now you’ll find that they have even more to offer than a beautiful garden and flowers for your table. Some of them

Daylily buds are only fat and golden like this for a day or two, so gather quickly if you’re planning a supply of golden needles for the winter.

make really good food. I’ll start with candied violets, even though they are silly, in honor of my neighbor Dottie, who used to sit in her kitchen on spring mornings happily humming 40’s songs and painting tray after tray of violet petals while her psychotic five-year-old roamed the neighborhood terrorizing kittens and small children. Here’s how you do the violets: Slightly beat an egg white with a little water, paint the mixture on the petals of violets with a fine brush, sprinkle with superfine sugar and let dry between sheets of waxed paper. I don’t know what you do about the kittens, poor things. Everyone knows, I think, that nasturtiums, both leaves and flowers, make a nice peppery addition to salads. A lot of other flower petals are edible, too, but the only ones I think are really worth it are marigolds. Strip the petals off the flower, dry them in the sun or a dehydrator, and you have “poor man’s saffron” for your rice and seafood dishes. You get all the brilliant yellow-orange color and even a hint of the flavor of real saffron--which is made from the stigmas of a certain kind of crocus that doesn’t grow around here. Speaking of stigmas, the buds of our common daylily are full of them, and they become the “golden needles” of the moo shu pork we all love in Chinese restaurants. Just pick the buds a day or two before they’re due to open. Wild daylilies are best, but avoid the roadside plants that are dusty from traffic. Dry the buds in a dehydrator and store in a jar in

Who would have thought that these beautiful vines growing in front of the Courthouse in Mt. Vernon were preparing an underground gastronomic treat for their gardeners? Sunflowers, next page, are so beautiful that it’s hard to forgo the flowers for the buds. One panful sautéed in garlic and olive oil will convince you, though.

the pantry. When you’re ready to use them, cover with boiling water to reconstitute them, then cut off the tough ends and pull them apart to reveal the long golden needles you’ve come to expect. Here’s an amazing one I found out about on the Internet: sunflower buds taste like artichoke bottoms. They really do. Just pick the buds a day or two before they’re due to bloom (the big-flowered varieties are best). Peel off the little green leaves around the bottom of the bud, which are bitter and furry. Then plop the rest in boiling salted water for 10-20 minutes, depending on size. After that, you can mound filling on them and bake them, sauté them in a little olive oil and garlic, or just chop them up for salad. Last but not least, don’t forget those gorgeous ornamental sweet potato vines you’ve had in hanging baskets or cascading over a wall in your garden all summer. When the frost finally takes the leaves, you’ll find a couple of meals’ worth of nice earthy sweet potatoes to remember your garden by. A little butter, a little brown sugar, and you’ll find yourself dreaming of seed catalogues in November. Alison Baumann shares a small farm in Savah with an assortment of creatures, both wild and domestic. She can be contacted at poseymagazine@aol.com

ÂŠ Photographed by J. Bruce Baumann

Feathers/By Sharon Sorenson

Changing Seasons

American goldfinch in snow

ÂŠ Photograph by Sharon Sorenson

Signs of the season, some subtle, some bold, signify the end of breeding and nesting and the beginning of lifestyle changes for birds. Spring and summer were family time. Birds mated, nested, defended territory, raised young, and, depending on species, repeated the process a second or third time. Most pairs, tolerant of non-competitive species, rigorously resist the intrusion of others of their kind. The stakes? Food. Non-competitive species

Daily, more and more birds of a single species gather together until inner instinct says, “Everybody’s here. Let’s roll.” forage for different insects, seeds, or pollen sources; same species, tapping the same foods, threaten survival. Now breeding season ends. Flocks of same-species birds hang out together, lining utility wires, jockeying for position in communal roosts. Pairs and their offspring have joined the larger family. Carolina chickadees, snatching seed from summer feeders in ones and twos, now feed in families of five or six. Mourning doves, resisting intrusive relatives all summer, now gather in groups of dozens, gleaning and feeding en mass along roadsides and in grain fields. Other flocking behavior plays in the air. Watch the sunrise or sunset skies for miles-long undulating ribbons of flocking birds in flight. From Posey County fields, we’ve seen bands stretch from horizon to horizon, millions of birds on the wing. Starlings, red-winged blackbirds, grackles, and cowbirds join forces for spectacular mass flights that pulsate across the skies. Another activity called “staging” parallels crazed teens at a rock fest, all shouting, all active, all ready to boogie. Daily, more and more birds of a single species gather together until inner instinct says, “Everybody’s here. Let’s roll.” It’s mindboggling togetherness well worth witnessing. One of the best local sites to see staging activity is Hovey Lake. Each September, we count 500 to 600 great egrets,

Great egrets at Hovey Lake

Tree swallow

Northern cardinal in winter those stately three-feet tall all-white birds, gathered at a single roost sight of several dozen trees, preparing for mass exodus. Nearby, 300 purple martins roost in two trees, gathering forces to move south. Tree swallows swarm utility lines, perching wing to wing. Within weeks, they’re gone. All of them.

Other signs of the season come at daybreak. Far from silent, mornings now lack the robust mating and territorial songfest of spring and early summer. Instead, dominated by chirps and twitters of juvenile cardinals and immature goldfinches, mornings get off to a quieter start. Some familiar songs will disappear entirely as migrants depart and geese honk their way south. The season also boasts a new look for some birds. Do male cardinals seem not so brilliantly red as they did in spring? Have you wondered about the splotchy look of those once-perfectly-gorgeous goldfinches? Blame the molt. While you’re buying new clothes to keep the kids warm on the way to school, birds are growing new plumage to keep warm on the way to weathering the winter. During the molt, some birds, like cardinals, get new winter wardrobes virtually the same color and design as their summer ones. Other birds, like

goldfinches, wrap themselves in more drab colors. Like cardinals, bluebirds look about the same year round. Our male bluebird’s blue isn’t so bright now, but not because sun faded his feathers. Rather, he looks peaked from feather wear, the result of ducking in and out of a nesting box dozens of times a day for weeks on end feeding hungry, yawning mouths. After raising three broods, the poor guy has reason to show wear! His seasonally new feathers give him better warmth and better flight. So the new season is marked as much by changing birds as by changing leaves. I’ll leave it to you which you prefer. And I won’t even ask if you have to rake leaves. Sharon and Charles Sorenson settled in St. Philip in 1966 and continue to improve their certified backyard wildlife habitat that to date has hosted 161 bird species and 53 butterfly species. Send your bird questions and comments to them or contact them for publicvenue programs, conferences, or seminars at: forthebirdscolumn@yahoo.com.

I’m just sayin’

A morning glory after a morning rain

PICTURE POSEY

With school out of session, we decided to dedicate the September/October issue of I’m just sayin’ to photography. All Posey County middle and high school students (including homeschoolers) were invited to submit photographs. Here are the best.

Weeds sprawled across the brick

ÂŠ Photograph by Samuel Oliver

I’m just sayin’ continued

Walking the long road I’m Just Sayin’ is a sounding board for young people. All middle and high school students (including homeschoolers) in Posey County are invited to submit essays, stories or poems on the designated topics for each issue. Submissions must be no longer than six sentences. Topics and deadlines for the next two issues: November/December: A Disappointment Deadline: September 20, 2011 January/February : Family Ties Deadline: November 20, 2011

My younger sister

An old radio sits alone in a desolate shed

ÂŠ Photograph by Samuel Oliver

Story & Photographs By Michael Webster

Not long ago, Goose Pond was nearly all open water, but due to the deposition of silt from backwater caused by Hovey Dam, lily pads are taking over and crowding out native plants and wildlife. In the not-toodistant future, Goose Pond will be entirely filled in with silt.

The early morning sun rises

as a big red disk behind the trees, its intense light casting mysterious shadows deep into the underbrush. There is so much water in the air the light practically has to swim to get to the pond. In these hours, the black water of the sloughs and their tributaries reflect a stunning array of cool greens, hot reds, brilliant yellows and fleeting blues. What Posey County residents call Goose Pond is actually a series of small cypress sloughs that form a geographic curve about four miles long. Situated in a lonely area just east of Mt. Vernon near the Ohio River and often inaccessible due to backwater or mud, Goose Pond is little known except to old hunters and fishermen and people interested in ancient American

history and archeology. It is a place of incredible natural abundance and beauty. Bald cypress, a majestic tree that dominates the slough, is rarely found this far north. A deciduous conifer, cousin to the California redwood, it is best known for its weather resistance and is often used to build boardwalks or decks. For nature enthusiasts, bald cypress is known for its “knees,” branches of its root system that rise out of the ground into the surrounding mud or water. Their purpose is unknown, but scientists speculate that they may provide additional oxygen to the tree or help anchor it in the soft, muddy soil in which it thrives. Wildlife abounds in the isolation of the slough as well. “I see beaver, snakes, coon, and possum. I’ve seen quite a few copper belly snakes on the pond. And of course there are a lot of deer and wild turkey,” says a nearby landowner. “In the last few years we’ve started seeing some bald eagles. There are at least three pair of geese that nest on the slough and stick around to raise their young. Last year we saw a family of bobcats—a mother and three young ones. There’s a fairly big beaver hut out in the slough by the old duck blind. And the fall is awesome. The leaves on the cypress turn a reddish brown color.” “Goose Pond is a unique ecosystem,” says Jesse Moore, manager of Southern Indiana properties for The Nature Conservancy, which has purchased part of the slough and hopes to purchase more. “[It is] home to plants and animals that need this environment to survive.”

Looking east from the Indian Mounds Road. Cypress sloughs sit at slightly lower elevation than their surroundings and water tends to congregate. The road is impassible when the water is up and muddy for much of the year.

The lilly pads invading Goose Pond have a quiet beauty of their own.

Goose Pond is serene in the beautiful light and natural quiet of early morning. The sounds of abundant wildlife and the occasional distant barge on the Ohio punctuate the silence without disturbing the serenity. Tracks in the soft ground around the slough reveal evidence of abundant wildlife. The slough provides home or temporary shelter to an intriguing variety of animals including eagles, bobcats, beaver, crawfish, migratory songbirds, as well as the waterfowl for which itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s known.

Cypress trees spend much or their time partially submerged. The purpose of their “knees” may help anchor the trees in the soft soil of the slough.

Unfortunately, Goose Pond as we know it probably won’t be around for much longer. Flooding from the Ohio River, more frequent in recent years, deposits up to two inches of silt every year; eventually, the slough will be filled in entirely. Much of it is already choked with invasive lily plants and silt from the backwater. “Since I’ve been down here in ’98, I’ve seen about a 40 percent increase in the lily pads,” says a neighbor. “It used to be you could get out there in a boat without much trouble, but now you’ve got to fight through those lilies. It’s silted in to the point where a lot of the fish don’t hang in there much anymore. The crappie and small pan fish are mostly gone.” For archeologists, Goose Pond echoes with history. It abuts the Mann site, which was the center of the Hopewell culture that dominated the Midwest for 700 years until around 500 A.D. “The Mann site is worthy of being designated a world heritage site,” says Mike Linderman, Western Regional Manager for State Historic Sites at Angel Mounds. “It is up there with the Mesoamerican pyramids or cliff dwellings in the Southwest. It’s that important.” Goose Pond is located off Indian Mounds Road south of Highway 62. If you plan to go, keep in mind that the road is often flooded, or at least very muddy. Also, although The Nature Conservancy allows hiking, much of the area is private property, and the owners do not permit hiking without permission, mostly due to the ongoing invasion of relic hunters. It’s best to stay on the road or contact The Nature Conservancy to familiarize yourself with property boundaries.

Photographer Michael Webster is a native of southern Indiana who studied photojournalism at Indiana University and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Posey Then & Now Circa 1916

Courtesy of the Poseyville Public Library

The stately brick Poseyville High School was built in 1910 on four acres of land on the corner of Fletchall and Church Streets, overlooking the center of town. The first floor of the building housed classrooms for grades 1-6, while grades 7-12 occupied to second floor. Manual Training and Domestic Science classes shared the basement with the gymnasium. The last high school class of 27 students graduated from Poseyville High School in 1959, but the building continued to be used as an elementary school until it was torn down in 1969.

Posey Then & Now Circa 2011

ÂŠ Photograph by J. Bruce Baumann

North Elementary School opened on the site of the old Poseyville High School in 1972, with students from Cynthiana and the old St. Francis Elementary School joining those from Poseyville, Stewartsville, and Griffin. Today, North Elementary has 369 students and 28 teachers in pre-school through sixth grade.

Out In The Back Of Beyond/Editor’s Notebook

he Vietnamese poet Y Nhi, quoted on the Posey Postcard page today, said, “Peace with the old land: that’s all I want.” To be honest, I think that’s what all of us really want. We live in such a beautiful place that sometimes we take it for granted. That includes those who were born and raised in Posey County, and those of us who will always be considered newcomers. I think the Creator made men stronger because He made women smarter. It took me a long time to figure that out. Speaking of the Almighty, I can’t imagine He’s spending much time in Washington this year, despite all the times they call on His name. I know if I were Him, I wouldn’t want to hang out with any of those guys.

Driving around the county I’ve noticed that it’s been a good year for potholes. I’m not saying there are more than usual, but I do believe that they have reached new depths. Coming home one night, I swear I saw an opossum using an extension ladder to climb out of one on Copperline Road. William James wrote, “Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does.” It brings to mind how some folks treat their fellow man. Common sense has lost a lot of its influence in today’s world. Which reminds me, when will they release Bob the bobcat back to Posey County? The students who contributed their photographs for the “I’m just sayin,” feature in this month’s issue of the magazine provided a refreshing view

of their world. Instead of writing to a prompt as they usually do, they took part in Picture Posey and gave us all a glimpse into their artistic side. I’ll finish up with my diatribe on finding cures for cancer. I’ve been thinking about all the money we’ve spent killing people in foreign countries, who want our form of democracy about as much as they want a dead camel. If those hundreds of billions of dollars had been spent on cancer research instead, we might have found a cure for breast cancer — or any one of a dozen other cancers — by now. Men, The Race for the Cure is coming to Evansville on September 24 this year. I hope you’ll plan to attend. Your sisters, daughters, mother and wife need you to fight this war at home.

J. Bruce Baumann Editor Posey Magazine poseymagazine@aol.com

Randy 1995—2011

“He gave me 16 years of unconditional love. You can’t ask for anything more than that.”

www.poseymagazine.com

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