THE MOSTLY TRUE ADVENTURES of a HOOSIER SCHOOLMASTER: a Memoir
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THE MOSTLY TRUE ADVENTURES OF A HOOSIER SCHOOLMASTER: A Memoir Ralph D. Gray 0 The Mostly True Adventures of A Hoosier Schoolmaster: A Memoir Ralph D. Gray Bloomington, Indiana 2011 1 Contents Chapter Page Preface 3 1. The Grays Come to Pike County 5 2. An Otwell Kid 20 3. The Three R’s 29 4. The War Years in Otwell and Evansville 42 5. Living in Gray’s Grocery 52 6. Hanover Daze 70 7. Going Abroad 91 8. How to Make Gunpowder 111 9. “Hail to the Orange, Hail to the Blue” 129 10. On Being a Buckeye 141 11. “Back Home Again in Indiana” 153 12. To the Capital City 172 13. On Becoming an Indiana Historian 182 14. The Editorial We (and Eye) 205 15. Travels, Travails, and Transitions 219 16. A New Life 238 Appendices 250 A. Additional family photographs 250 B. List of illustrations 256 C. List of book publications 259 2 This book is dedicated, with love and appreciation, to the KiDS Karen, David, and Sarah 3 Preface ccording to several people, mainly those, I suppose, who have already written their memoirs, everybody should write about their own lives, primarily for A family members, but also for themselves and others. I started drafting these pages in 2009, thinking I would have a complete manuscript in a matter of months and perhaps a published book in 2010. Now it appears, having completed the first draft in the latter part of 2010, that a version of this work accessible probably on line to others might be available sometime in 2011 or a bit later. In order to help readers, I want to offer here an introduction to the cast of characters and an overview of the major events in the life of this “Hoosier schoolmaster,” which is a euphemism for “teacher,” my profession from 1961 to 1997, when I retired as a professor of history at Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI). By that time, in addition to having taught history at universities in Delaware, Illinois, Ohio, and Indiana, I was the author of more than a dozen books, several dozen articles and book reviews, and had served on a large number of boards and committees of history-related organizations, most notably on the board of trustees of the Indiana Historical Society for nine years. By then, too, I was a widower, having lost my wife of 37 years to the ravages of multiple sclerosis in 1993, but we were the parents of three wonderful children and they, over the years, have produced four grandchildren. My life began in Otwell, Pike County, Indiana, in 1933, when I became the second of four sons of Lee M. and Voris R. (Gray) Gray, living first in the home, and also the editorial office, of Mrs. Beulah B. Gray, the editor of The Otwell Star. My brothers, in birth order, are Eddie (1931), Robert (1939), and Charlie (1942). My education came initially from the public schools in Otwell, Seymour, Evansville, and then, finally, Petersburg, all in Indiana. I also attended an Indiana college, Hanover, beautifully situated high above the banks of the Ohio River near Madison. Having been awarded a Fulbright scholarship upon my graduation from Hanover, I next attended the University of Durham, England. While there, I received a fellowship from the Eleutherian Mills-Hagley Foundation in Delaware, which involved helping with the early development of the E. I. DuPont Company-sponsored Hagley Museum while attending the University of Delaware. I completed my formal education at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana. 4 My first full-time teaching position was at Ohio State University; after three years there, I moved into the Indiana University (IU) system in 1964, teaching first at its Kokomo campus and then in Indianapolis at what became, soon after my arrival, IUPUI. Jan (Janice Rae Everett, from Crown Point, Indiana) and I, married in 1956, had three children, one at each of the Big Ten universities I was associated with. Karen was born in 1960, while I was a teaching assistant at the University of Illinois; David came along in 1962, and is an Ohio State Buckeye; and Sarah arrived in 1966, during my early years with Indiana University up in Kokomo. We moved to Indianapolis in 1968, where I served into 1997 as a professor of history, and then stayed on in order to write the history of that remarkable institution, which has become a model of an urban university for the rest of the country. Sadly, Jan, who had battled multiple sclerosis for fully twenty years, died in 1993. I retired from teaching four years later, completed the IUPUI book in 2002, married Beth Van Vorst, who also retired from IUPUI in 1997, in 2003, and in 2009 we really both retired by moving into a large two-story house the Meadowood Retirement Center in Bloomington in 2009. Ralph D. Gray (Friday) May 13, 2011 5 Chapter 1 The Grays Come to Pike County or a long time I have harbored the idea of a personal memoir, primarily for the family and close friends, but also for my own benefit. It will be fun as well as F helpful to have an accurate (well, as close as I can make it) record of personal comings and goings, achievements and failures or disappointments, countless fortuitous and happenchance encounters. I have already written pieces that fill in some background material on the Gray family, such as the opening pages of a still incomplete biography of a distant relative, attorney Carl M. Gray of Petersburg, and the brief article on my maternal grandmother, Otwell Star editor Beulah B. Gray, that was published in Traces of Indiana and Midwestern History (1999), and I will incorporate some of that work here. For example, at the beginning of the proposed Carl Gray book, I reviewed the history of Pike County, its role in the state’s pioneer period, and when and why the first Grays came to that area, pointing out initially that southern Indiana was the first area of what became the state of Indiana to be settled. The earliest French colonists had made Vincennes, along the lower Wabash River, one of its major military and administrative centers during the eighteenth century. Subsequently lost to the British during the so-called French and Indian War (1754-1763), Vincennes was the scene of George Rogers Clark’s dramatic capture of Fort Sackville from the British during the American Revolutionary War. Sporadic fighting and Indian forays in the Ohio Valley, coupled with unsettled conditions along the eastern seaboard of the new United States, prevented substantial western expansion during the latter quarter of the eighteenth century, but the westering desire of Americans led to significant movement into Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois following 1800. In that year, Congress officially organized the Indiana Territory, President John Adams appointed William Henry Harrison as territorial governor, and a new phase of western history began. Pioneer Indiana was in many ways a forbidding place. Heavily forested, its soil undisturbed except by wandering herds of buffalo and equally nomadic Native American peoples, southern Indiana was hilly, trackless except for the animal trails, pristine. Yet the land, in places, was fertile, inviting, and invigorating to the pioneer 6 spirits that were hardy enough to accept the challenge of survival and the prospects of independence, land ownership, and profits. Nearly 25,000 settlers, almost five times the number that lived in Indiana in 1800, occupied the territory in 1810, and that number increased six fold during the following decade. “They came across the mountains, down the rivers, and over the western trails,” according to Indiana historian James H. Madison, in basically three separate “streams of migration” (from New England, the Mid-Atlantic states, and the South).1 By far the greatest number of early settlers came from the upland South—western Virginia and North Carolina, eastern Tennessee and Kentucky. Typically, these pioneers had ventured across the Appalachians into western Tennessee and eastern Kentucky at the end of the Revolutionary War. The advent of a new century witnessed a trickle, a larger flow, and then a flood of new settlers north of the Ohio River. The first Grays, my pioneer ancestors, were a part of this typical migration pattern, arriving in Indiana before the state was organized. William and Keziah Ball Gray reached the Indiana Territory in 1811, settling first at White Oaks Springs (near where Petersburg was subsequently platted) and then at nearby Highbanks, along the southern reaches of the eastern fork of White River. The Grays raised a large and enterprising family of at least ten children in this locality. According to family tradition, Keziah Ball (1790-1856) was, at the time of her birth in western Virginia, a distant relative of the sitting and first president of the United States. George Washington’s mother was Mary Ball Washington (1708-1789), a young woman from Lancaster County, Virginia, who had lived as a child in both Northumberland and Westmoreland counties. She married Augustine Washington of Westmoreland County in 1731, a widower with three children, and they subsequently had five more children. Their first child, a son, George, was born on February 22, 1732. Following Augustine’s death in 1743, Mary Ball Washington remained in eastern Virginia, the last twenty years in Fredericksburg. How this lady was related, if at all, to various Ball families in western Virginia is not known. What is known is that John Ball (1758-1809), Keziah’s father, was one of the pioneer settlers in Lee County, the westernmost county of the state.