Courthouse Photography Mania

My wife says I take too many photos of the Noble County Courthouse in Albion, and she's absolutely right. But you see, I fuel up the car right across the street, and it's just ... sitting there ... looking all photogenic and everything, if a little lopsided from this angle ...

Even from the same angle, the weather and lighting can make the view very different.

My Writing Career Is History

SLIGHTLY OFF THE MARK

            Following your dreams can take you to some strange roads that might not have anything to do with your dreams, at all.

            We can’t all have our first dreams, of course. America really wouldn’t function with fifty million actors, one hundred million singers, and two hundred and fifty million lottery winners. What do those all have in common? Long odds.

            Still, it’s important to pursue a dream, even if it isn’t the dream you end up with. My grandkids want to be ninjas. It’s probably not on the average college curriculum, but who knows? I’m saving back some masks and black pajamas, just in case.

            My first dreams were to be a scientist, or an astronaut … or better yet, a combination of the two: a Science Officer. Yes, I was a Trekkie, why do you ask? But I had to give up those dreams because, it turns out, both jobs require being good at math.

            A writer doesn’t have to be good at math.

            Or so I told myself. By the time I was halfway through high school, I settled on a career plan: I would become a firefighter, and on my days off I would write best-selling novels. My backup plan would be a forest ranger, thus putting me in a position to battle forest fires in between writing books.

            I cheerfully ignored the results of counseling tests, which revealed I would be ideally suited for a career in the food service industry. Years later I realized food service was actually not a bad career path from the standpoint of employment opportunities and management paths. I mean, how many astronauts get hired every year?

            My guaranteed career path fell short, due to shortsightedness. Or is it long-sightedness? Whichever it was, my eyesight didn’t meet the standards at the time for full time firefighting. This was despite my discovery as a volunteer that once you got into a burning building, you couldn’t see a darned thing anyway.

            It’s the only time I ever cried at the optometrist office.

            Now here I am, in my twenty-third year with the Noble County Sheriff Department, two decades of that as an emergency dispatcher. While I was too busy trying to find a career to notice I had one, I had one.

            Irony is my middle name. And the irony didn’t stop, because for over three decades I continued to work toward establishing a fiction writing career. While I was busy writing novels and short stories and not selling them, I became a humor columnist, newspaper reporter, and finally non-fiction book writer, none of which have anything to do with fiction. It was totally by accident. Accident is also my middle name. I’ve never asked my parents why.

            Irony is a gift that keeps on giving, because just as I finished another novel manuscript, my wife and I began to discuss doing a humor book about national or Indiana state history. Within weeks of us discussing it, I was put in touch with a publisher … a history publisher.

Arcadia Publishing has a long history of books about, well, history, and they were looking for someone to do a photo-heavy book about the history of Albion and Noble County. (Not humor related, you’ll be unhappy or happy to know.)

            As it happens, my wife and I had done a history book the year before, a photo-heavy book about the Albion Fire Department. But this book was going to be even photo-heavier. After a month of talking and filling out paperwork, I signed the contract for Images of America: Albion and Noble County.

            True, I’ve just published my fourth work of fiction. Just the same, Arcadia is the first large publisher I’ve signed with, so my writing is, well, history.

            It’s as if, while training to be an astronaut, I fell into a career as a deep-sea diver.

            Now I’m asking you, all fourteen of my regular readers, to help me with this project. My attempts to be a scientist didn’t pan out, so I don’t have a time machine: I need historical photos from around Noble County, and they have to be prints. Emily, my wife/editor/webmaster/technical director/computer whiz, will scan the prints with your permission and then give them back to you (along with the scanned image on a disk, if you’re interested). Your historical photo, along with another two hundred or more others, could appear in the print and electronic versions of the book, but otherwise would still be yours.

            It’s a pretty cool project, and a great way to hold onto history and maybe get kids interested in it. Who knows? Maybe it’ll put some of them on a path to being historians.

            It’s never too late for a career change.

A Night At The Opera House

SLIGHTLY OFF THE MARK

            Years ago I shopped at a place called Excel Home Furnishings on the north  side of the Noble County Courthouse square. I liked wandering around the second floor, because they’d installed enclosed bridges that allowed the furniture to be displayed not only in the original building, but in two other neighboring ones.

            (I have no explanation for why I love exploring sprawling areas like that. It’s why I keep getting lost at the State Park … and the mall.)

            In one of those buildings most of the upstairs was open, and there was a big raised area, like a stage. For someone who lived in a utility apartment at the time, I thought it was really cool.

            It turned out to be even more cool when one of the employees showed me a normally closed off area, where we could see the outer walls and roof. There they were, plain as day: Charred wood and smoke stains. At one time in the distant past, he explained, the building had burned.

            That was my introduction to the Albion Opera House.

 

            Now the building is for sale, and there’s a push on to save it. Save it from what, you say? Well, my first guess would be parking lots. There’s not enough parking in downtown Albion, but if all the old brick buildings were knocked down and turned into pavement, there wouldn’t be much reason to park there anyway.

            I think it should be saved, so my rich readers should contact Phyllis Herendeen at the Unique Boutique in Albion, or by e-mail at pjhere@ligtel.com.

            What do you mean, I don’t have any rich readers?

            I know what you’re thinking: “But Mark, you hate opera.”

            True. But I like orchestras, which performed there, and I love movies, which were screened there. Other people like sports: Basketball games were once played in the Opera House. Suppers, musicals, dances … it was an armory during World War 2, and for a short time in the 1880’s it housed the Noble County Government. Maybe they even had operas there. Just ask Linda Shultz, who wrote a book about Albion’s history long before I did. (What, you thought I was original?)

            But the reason I want to see the building saved dates not back to its construction before the 1880’s, but for something that happened to it in 1931 – something that should have ensured its destruction.

            Considering the story I started with, I suppose no one is in suspense.

            Consider not only the fire, but the times: It was January 16, 1931, when someone noticed the flames at about 11 p.m.

            Only a year earlier the Albion Fire Department got their first motorized fire truck, a 1929 engine. When fire broke out in the large two story brick Opera House, and threatened to spread to other nearby structures, that was the first apparatus out of the firehouse two blocks away.

            Second came a Ford pickup truck, on which had been mounted the chemical engine that was originally horse-drawn. The Ford also towed a 1910 era two wheeled cart, which had mounted on it 350 feet of hose. A second, rarely used reserve hose cart held 200 feet of hose, and was probably hauled to the scene by hand at this moment of crisis.

            That was it.

            Soon the chemical engine ran out of chemicals to pressurize water. Chief John F. Gatwood, his two Assistant Chiefs and eighteen volunteers were left with one fire engine, which could in a best case scenario supply two fire hoses. Did they call for help from other towns? Sure. But how long did it take other volunteers to go ten or more miles on 1931 roads, at nighttime in the middle of January?

            In case you haven’t read Smoky Days and Sleepless Nights, I’m not going to spoil you on whether they managed to save the Albion Opera House. But I do think that the building is worth saving today.

            Well, shoot.

Okay, forget the spoiler thing. The Noble County Democrat newspaper office on the first floor was saved, and by the first week of February contractors named Moore and Thomas started work on remodeling. Twenty-seven local businessmen each donated $100 to rebuild the second floor, putting in a brand new arched roof and a bigger stage. The place was open for business in two months.

             

So yeah, I think it’s worth saving: not only for the historical aspect, but because we already saved the thing once, doggone it. And while it’s going to take more than a hundred bucks apiece, I can’t help thinking an effort by local citizens to restore the place would be worth it.

            Personally, I’d like to own the building myself. It would be cool to have a big open air apartment upstairs and maybe downstairs a little museum in front and my writing office in back. But I also think it would be cool to keep the bills I already have paid, so we’ll have to go to Plan B.

            Does anyone have a Plan B?