Benton County (series)

I was the only one in my family who was from Benton County - I was born there and it was the only home I knew until we moved to Lafayette in 1981, when I was 13. My dad would occasionally comment that I was the only one of the ten of us kids who had his baptism and first communion (roughly birth and 2nd grade) in the same parish - in this case, Sacred Heart, Fowler. He would say this with an almost wistful air, with the implication that I was lucky, that others had made sacrifices and moved around and I hadn't been asked to do that.

And he was right. I was lucky. I loved Benton County - maybe because it's all I knew and I'd've loved anywhere, but maybe there was something about the gentle landscape and wide open spaces and the seasons that I loved, too.
(Above right - looking south down US 52 towards Fowler from Earl Park.)

My brothers and sisters had a different opinion - and it seemed to be that the older the sibling the less he or she liked it. We little kids got the message early that Benton County was beneath us, that there had been other places that had been better, that it was a back water, a hicksville with bad schools, no culture, no doctor and no dentist. (There was a dentist, but my ma had a fight with him because he wouldn't provide dental care to the migrant farm workers in town, and so we drove to Kentland in the next county, 14 miles away.)

Before moving to Fowler, my family had lived outside Niagara Falls, New York, where the eldest was born; then, when Dad was drafted during the Korean War, they moved to Honolulu, Hawai'i, which was the birthplace of #2; back to Niagara Falls for the births of #'s 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7; then Memphis, TN, for about 12 minutes but long enough for #8; before returning back north to Adrian, Michigan, for birth #9; and then finally Fowler, Indiana, county seat of Benton County, in time for me, #10, to be born a Hoosier.

I can see why Dad picked Benton County - and it was just Dad, as with nine kids he and mom couldn't both go swanning off to house-hunt so he bought it and Mom+9 came later, sight unseen - but it wasn't inevitable. Dad worked in West Lafayette, a considerably larger city, next to Purdue University and Lafayette, a bigger city still, in the next county over. Dad's plant was 26 miles southeast down US 52, a four lane highway, which in good weather meant he was about 30 minutes door to door from work. But with nine kids Benton County made more sense economically - for one thing, there were lots of jobs for teenagers in the fields and the canning company across the road, and there was a free Catholic Elementary school, Sacred Heart. Yup, free. Well, it was $30 a year for books, but that was it - no tuition fees. Since my parents were adamant that all ten of us go to Catholic school, no tuition fees saved them, literally, thousands of dollars. Housing costs in Fowler were lower than just about anywhere else (even today, a four bedroom house can go for $50K), and everything else was pretty cheap, too. We had a gas tank out back so we were able to get gas in bulk - and the Co-op fuel delivery man went to Sacred Heart and would let things slide when needed. Which was good, because it was needed not infrequently. We heated our house with fuel oil, and that we got in bulk too. From the Co-op.

I can also see why older siblings hated it - or at least badmouthed it. The relative shortcomings of Benton County are pretty evident. I couldn't find comparative data at the county level for 1970, but in 1990 and 2000, Benton County was the third least populous in the state of Indiana. The current population density of 22 people / square mile is 2nd lowest of all Indiana counties (the Indiana state mean is 178/sq mile; that of Benton County is below the mean of Nebraska, by contrast). There's not much there. In 1970, just after we moved there, the population for the whole county was 11,262, It would have been a little livelier, but there was still only one high school and one stop-and-go light (there were also a few flashing lights, red one way and yellow the other, but now that I think about the stop-and-go light was usually flashing that way, too).

Compared to the counties my families had lived in previously, Benton County had precious little to offer; even Lenawee County, in Michigan, the most rural of all previous locations, had over ten times as many people as Benton County, and my family had lived in the County Seat of Adrian with a population of nearly 20,000 people, at least eight times Fowler's total.

Some of my older brothers used to hitch-hike the 26 miles into West Lafayette for the bottomless cup of coffee of at Sambo's (yes, Sambo's, of all things...that's a pic of what the West Lafayette location looked like outside, and here's the inside) - and at least once, after a fairly typical family blow-out over the phone bill, for the pay phone to call their friends instead of making what were long distance calls from home. (That particular hitch-hiking trip was one they pointedly and repeatedly and vocally hashed over, usually within earshot of my father. File that under "What does this button do?") (Remember those? Long distance calls, I mean?)

In Benton County, there wasn't much to do, especially for teenagers.

In the summer, there was the Fowler Park pool, at which we could get a "family pass" which gave us unlimited use of the pool all summer long for a flat fee. (It looks like they've removed the high dive, which is too bad.)

There was a movie theater, open intermittently during my 13 years in Benton County. It had a great Art Deco facade which, I'll come clean, I appreciated not at all as a youth. (They are fixing it up and showing first run movies there these days, for $5 - Harry Potter is there now. There are a ton of pictures here and a website on the history and restoration efforts of the Fowler by the Prairie Restoration Guild here.) I was thrilled when the Fowler was open; I saw Urban Cowboy there (and was confused as to why I wanted the camera to linger a little more on John Travolta and a little less on Debra Winger); I saw one of the Herbie movies there; and in a revival I saw The Gnomemobile there. But to be fair, one movie theater does not an entertainment district make. My older siblings must have been bored stupid, and likely were broke much of the time without the means to get to more exciting places. I was young, and entertained by playing in our driveway.

Another huge difference in our Fowler experience was that I was born in Benton County, and grew up with a peer group. I didn't have to make friends, the kids I grew up had always been my friends and so I was accepted. I had nothing that I had given up to come to Fowler; there was no past in which I had been athletic, popular, smart, well-known - all things my older siblings had left behind, again, with the move to my hometown. (I didn't really understand that cost of moving until I had to do it at 13, when I had to leave some of those things behind to start over and define myself in a new social milieu in which I knew no rules.)

Of course it sucked. Lafayette would have sucked; Indy would have sucked; Chicago or Seattle or Montreal would not have been where their friends were, where their favorite teachers taught, or near the sports teams they cheered for. Add to that the fact that Benton County, for all its subtle charms, was an extremely rural and disconnected place to be - the year was 1968, after all - and older siblings had some entirely understandable and well-placed grievances.

Unfortunately, I didn't understand this context as a five- or 10- or 12-year old, and I resented how my hometown wasn't as good as others they'd known. (And let's be honest - Adrian, Michigan, might have been nice, but I've since driven by the address on my hand-me-down ball glove and it wasn't Xanadu.) I resented being shut out of that common experience, too, and not being able to share in the collective family memory. I also understood that part of what was beneath my older siblings was me - I was a local, after all, and someone who thought Jell-o was the highest height to which dessert could aspire and who said, like the yokels, "mayzhure" and "warsh" and who wore the same pair of hand me down jeans every day for a week. And perhaps worst of all, part of the mythology that we, our family, were better than Benton County seeped in, and I am deeply embarrassed to say part of me believed it.

Don't misunderstand me, I have no interest in going back to Benton County to live - I mean, read my Urban Dictionary entry for Fowler if you don't believe me (and if you want recent evidence of my condescension too, I'm afraid) - but we all have to come from somewhere. And I thought Benton County was beautiful, and it was all I knew and all I needed, and I loved it.

Dad was right. I was lucky.