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National Geographic : 1936 Sep
Contents
INDIANA JOURNEY all over the Western Hemisphere, in all our wars since 1860, and in the Boer War. Now the automobile of that name is built here in great numbers (Color Plate XVI). In and about South Bend roost some 45,000 homing pigeons. Clubs sponsor races each summer; the longest is about a thousand miles, from Abilene, Texas, back to South Bend. Many poor fish would be alive today, could fish but see and know the South Bend Bait Company. Wooden frogs, mice, and minnows; artificial flies, every tidbit to tempt piscatorial gluttony and fool a fish that man's genius can conjure up is made here. In one popular lure, the "buck tail," they use each year the tails of more than 10,000 deer. Somewhere, always, there is the hook! (Color Plate XIII.) Amid smell of banana oil and paint, long rows of girls work at wrapping split bam boo poles and painting spots on frogs, or putting glassy eyes on phony little min nows. In the manager's office, two sculp tured human hands falter far apart on a panel, measuring "The One That Got Away." THE MIRACLE OF GARY The magic rise of Gary was like that of the made-to-order Manchurian town of Dalny (now Dairen) built by Imperial ukase. To Dalny, years ago, the Tsar sent not only men and materials to make a city, but goods for its new stores, and troops of players for its new theater-all by train across- Siberia! Gary rose just as instantaneously. grew so fast that families moved into homes 24 hours after work started on them. To make lawns and gardens on the sand wastes, trainloads of black dirt were hauled in; grown trees were brought and planted. Steel mills rose; shiploads of ore came from up the Great Lakes. Indiana awoke to find steel her chief industry (page 303). From the high, glassed-in shelter of a calm, alert operator who works giant ma chinery merely by pressing electric buttons, you can see three-and-four-hundred-ton, red-hot billets being hammered, shaped, and tossed about as a blacksmith might handle a horseshoe on his anvil. Along with Hammond, East Chicago, and Whiting, Gary forms the "Calumet District," one of the Nation's chief indus trial centers. Pipe lines from Texas, Wyo- ming, and other far-away fields bring crude oil here to our largest inland refineries. East along Lake Michigan lie those odd looking sand hills, the dunes (Plates IX and XI).* "All this beach used to be so empty," said a retired artillery officer, "that we dragged our guns out on the hard sand and banged away. . . . Look at the crowds now! Sunday afternoon a red light may stop a line of cars five miles long." Off Michigan City we saw a strange sight. Real estate men there had bought the "Colonial Village" from the Chicago Cen tury of Progress, and were moving it-en masse-on barges, bringing it here and set ting it up on the dunes. One house, on a bobbing barge, resembled Noah's Ark. But the bird that flew out of it was a gull, in stead of a dove! To Indiana Dunes State Park, Chicago pleasure seekers flock. So do Hoosiers; but various others play in and about the lakes fringed with summer hotels and cot tages that dot northern Indiana (Color Plate X). Everybody fishes. "I dig worms in the fall, put them in buckets of dirt, and store them in the cellar," said one man. "Then in the spring I have good, strong worms handy when the fish begin to bite." A boy said, "I earned high-school expenses catching and selling crickets." One signboard on the way to Pokagon State Park reads, "Fish Worms and Ice Cream!" The park, with its rambling Pollawatomi Inn on James Lake and its herds of elk and buffalo, is a favorite resting' place on this crowded travel lane across northern Indiana. ALL AMERICA BLOWS ELKHART'S HORN AND POUNDS ITS DRUM! Whether you play the piccolo, pound a drum, or moan on a saxophone, you can buy one in Elkhart. One-third of all its citizens make these things. At the Conn plant we saw them dressing calfskins at the rate of 1,000 a week for use as drumheads; shaping every kind of horn from trumpet to bass; carving hardwoods for the reeds. Elkhart equips army, police, and other brass bands for many countries overseas. It sends cornets and trombones to mission aries in China, Africa, and the South Seas, who blow the tunes that lead native * See "Indiana's Unrivaled Sand-Dunes," by Orpheus Moyer Schantz, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE, May, 1919. 315
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