I Remember Bloomington
I REMEMBER BLOOMINGTON Former residents and employees recall a fabled Midwestern hamlet. The Midwest—specifically Bloomington, Indiana—is built into every joist and lattice of this magazine. It...
...Afterwards we walked outside into the cool late-summer evening to the car, but before leaving we heard the melody of a whippoorwill...
...DEMAND WILL BE GREAT FOR THIS / LIMITED EDITION SO WE / WOULD SUGGEST THAT YOU .. . / Name Enclosed is $ / / Address / / / ORDER YOUR COPIES NOW...
...My introduction came early...
...Bob spoke to the dean, got the sophomore enrolled in summer school, and put him on a regimen of class, study, and work...
...I next moved into a large suburban home where I shared space with the owners—two members of a swing band —and the girlfriend of one of them—who ran the Bloomington Clinic for Rape Victims...
...There was no one around to get the issue finished save Richard Starr, my fellow intern, and me...
...And today, Bob's compassion is my biggest memory of Bloomington...
...For every friendly, unpretentious, down-home good eating place in the area, there must have been a dozen friendly, unpretentious hash houses with plainly terrible food...
...Waving a letter from my doctor, I escaped from that lease after a few months and ended up in a long, roach-infested garret above the town bookstore...
...This is a must read for anyone who has an interest in U.S...
...16.50 ISBN 0-89874-984-0 ADULT EDUCATION AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH by Sherman M. Stanage Orig...
...Famed Lake Monroe is located there, with beautiful Brown County next door...
...I overheard him once talking heatedly about the alienation of the working classes under capitalism, although I don't think he had learned about the subject firsthand...
...stadium, at 1200 North Indiana, Lot #6...
...Andy Stark, a policy adviser to the Prime Minister of Canada, was TAS's assistant managing editor in late 1980 and the first half of 1981...
...CURRICULUM MODELS IN ADULT EDUCATION by Michael Langenbach Orig...
...Nobody's ever said that before...
...The glaciers indeed leveled the northern part of the state, but God stopped glaciating about thirty miles south of Indianapolis, and that paradise is known as Southern Indiana...
...24.50 ISBN 0-89874-936-0 When ordering, please add $4.00 for first book, $1.00 for each additional to cover shipping...
...How can you work for that rag...
...But a bit of gooey sentimentality is hardly out of place...
...He himself had one on the outskirts of town, and he spoke of it with the knowing satisfaction of a man who'd bought Xerox at five...
...Since 1980, that center has gravitated toward Washington, and so have many of the writers and editors who are part of the Spectator community...
...Mentally speaking, these two were by far the healthiest people in the house during the three years I lived there...
...A personal note: On the darker side, during my Bloomington stay I heard National Public Radio for the first time—it is a university town—and got in the habit of listening to it every day...
...Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan Celebrating the 20th anniversary of one of the country's liveliest and most unpredictable journals of opinion, Orthodoxy presents a collection of essays which richly reaffirms the reputation of The American Spectator...
...Even so, the environmental impact statement shows radical silliness is up 20 points and municipal liberalism limps along...
...Paul, MN 55107 Please send me copies of THE POPE IN AMERICA — II at $8.00 each postpaid...
...Available from your oval bookseller, or OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS 1050 Carmack Road Columbus, Ohio 43210 614-292-6930 Andy Stark A year in Bloomington can inspire an amount of amnesia sufficient to obliterate all memory of the experience...
...Baron von Kannon was publisher of The American Spectator until 1980...
...His distaste for New York, and presumably for what it represented, was palpable...
...I had never seen the full-blown suburban species...
...94 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1987 Joseph P Duggan Bloomington during the 1970s was not a culinary capital, but it left me with some gustatory memories...
...William McGurn, deputy editorial page editor of the Asian Wall Street Journal, was assistant managing editor of The American Spectator from 1981 to 1983...
...Erich Eichman, managing editor of the New Criterion, was assistant managing editor of The American Spectator in 1978-1979 and its managing editor in 1980...
...On the drive down from the Indianapolis airport Paul Vivian, TAS researcher and officer in the Indiana National Guard, solemnly advised me—providing, of course, I got the job—to invest in a trailer first thing...
...I do not mean anything resembling the 1980s "new American cooking," no goat-cheese blue-cornmeal pizza or the like...
...Then, too, on the outskirts of town there was a wonderful mall, where if you walked around long enough and took in all the sights and screwed up your courage, you could imagine that you were somewhere else entirely—likemaybe Des Moines or Kansas City...
...I still think of it that way...
...a place near Indiana University where you could get lemonade with crushed strawberries in it...
...City State Zip / PLEASE INCLUDE PAYMENT WITH ORDER / / ‘1...
...You need a systematic and encouraging way to fit daily Bible study into your busy schedule...
...If you gloss over the Baby Doe case, the second McCloskey-McIntyre campaign, "Hoosiers" The Movie, IU's NCAA basketball championship, the exploits/exploitations of Bob Knight, the small-town rocksodizing of John Cougar Mellencamp, and the usual number of ax murders, you get down to the Polychloride Biphenyls Trouble, seeping ineluctably toward hysteria...
...The particularly well-heeled would also have a pick-up truck, for the lady of the house...
...In the case of "Pink," for example, they worked very closely for some months with Jimmy Durante's old lyricist...
...1988 208 pp...
...Most of the next winding ninety miles on state road 37 pass through the bucolic Hoosier National Forest until you reach the mighty Ohio River, the natural border with Kentucky...
...That, and trailers...
...Baron von Kannon When Andy Ferguson called and asked me to write about Bloomington memories, I knew immediately that I did not want to talk about the early days of the magazine, our fights with the New Left students and professors, the early support of the Lilly family and all of that, as important and nostalgic as it is...
...New York has lots of little drugstores...
...I dragged my mother out for a visit, and we sat on the grass and watched the fireworks...
...At the Walnut Lounge we found Pabst Blue Ribbon and Busch Bavarian, cold and fresh and popularly priced...
...Ron Burr once estimated a fortune could be made by scraping the boiled-away vitamins from Ladyman's ceiling and selling them to a pharmaceutical firm...
...the cellar, uninhabitable for all but rats and mice, was the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Room, and a favorite spot to entertain liberals...
...But it didn't matter...
...So, primary among the reasons I feel grateful toward The American Spectator is that I was given a great gift during the summer I spent in Bloomington: the gift of competence...
...Trailers to me still meant Appalachia, or Long Island residents on holiday...
...she met through her work...
...Hinkle had no use for grilling—why risk drying the meat and impart a distracting flavor of smoke...
...Although I lived in town, a bird sanctuary was only ten minutes from my apartment...
...So, too, with Ladyman's Cafe...
...The genius behind this accomplishment, Leon Hinkle, had his establishment on the limestone heights along the town's west end...
...During my first year, the magazine celebrated its tenth anniversary with a dinner in New York City...
...Mostly it served as a temporary resting place for a changing collection of demoralized graduate students...
...I don't think any of us could have made it without liquid forms of the staff of life...
...But Bloomington will always be the true home of a magazine that has stood for so long in brave opposition to the political-cultural hegemony of the left...
...I think this question fairly sums up the Bloomington intelligentsia's judgment of the magazine...
...Judy Mathews Tyrrell has been a contributor to The American Spectator since 1969...
...I used to loiter in his office after every class, dragging out our meager contact by asking interminable questions about etymology...
...If the Tower Commission had asked my advice, I'd have said there was nothing wrong with the NSC that couldn't have been fixed by putting Dave Effingham in as watchofficer in the Situation Room...
...From Indiana, Alaska, and Hawaii call 1-219-356-8400...
...Both Jonestown and the Manson murders were perpetrated by Hoosiers...
...If you live by Kent Owen downwind of where the incinerator is supposed to be built, you can't be blamed for fretting...
...We joked, kibitzed, worried, and, with a great feeling of exhilaration, got it done on deadline...
...I was there during the glorious summer of 1984 when the Chicago Cubs won the National League East and came as close as the Cubs can to winning a pennant...
...The "gates" open as you leave Bloomington and travel south past the old Speedway Cafe...
...Compassion for a mixed-up twentyyear-old Indiana University sophomore who, in a two-semester streak of youthful stupidity, managed to flunk out of college...
...For short-termers on the magazine life was almost entirely pleasant there...
...But I also came away with a sense that the Midwest was in spiritual trouble, that it had lost its industrial inventiveness and, more important, its moral foundations...
...A slew of new-found fests makes the town merry, and Rand McNally says hereabouts is one of the nation's choicer locales for retiring, though neither the Marcoses nor the Duvaliers are fixing to settle...
...Neil Howe was managing editor of The Alternative from 1972 to 1974...
...Nonetheless, since the magazine was in the thick of the struggle against left-wing ideas, it was only natural that it should have celebrated itself ten years ago in New York, the center of our political-cultural life...
...We sat in the car a long time and listened to him sing...
...The bathroom.(which worked well in summer, but not at all in winter after the pipes froze) was the John F. Kennedy Memorial John...
...His work is cause for celebration...
...Now You Can Read the Entire Bible in a Year with The Catholic OneYear Bible...
...It was the most fun I had ever had...
...One of them, I remember, was in something called religious studies...
...But mostly I was left alone in my apartment, where I would watch hours of "Hee-Haw" re-run-in a largely vain attempt to put my new life into some kind of perspective...
...Full pay for the entire six-months' absence from work...
...By ordering your copy of The Pope In America now, you will save 20% of the advertised price...
...ugly winters of mud-rain-snow drizzle, dazzling ice storms that left an extra window on your car after you rolled the inside window down, dirty and unimported 4x4s (definitely not designed for recreation), young twang-speaking mountain couples in from Kentucky to work on the assembly lines, waitresses that said "yes sir," and a gas stove that sometimes whooshed when you lit it in the morning...
...Bachelors of Music would hang around Bloomington in the year or so after graduation, coalesce into little bands or quartets, and work closely but informally with one of the many retired music-world greats who seemed to have gathered in the outlying countryside...
...Bloomington itself was a cosmopolitan center, the home of world-classchamber music, splendid student opera at $4 a ticket, scholarship on esoterica ranging from Tibet to fungi, as well as college basketball at its Bobby Knight finest...
...Traveling through southern Indiana with the late Professor Charles Hyneman, I learned a deep respect for the republican virtue of past generations in the rural Midwest, and an appreciation for the upward mobility of Kentucky hillfolk who had found opportunity in the quarries and assembly plants outside Bloomington...
...This sophisticated political analysis completed, I would stroll home through the darkness to my apartment on Lincoln Street...
...Fourth of July wasamazingly—incredibly pleasant there...
...What has busied Bloomington ever since...
...Here writers as diverse as George Will and P J. O'Rourke, Tom Wolfe and David Niven, offer fresh observations on the personalities and dilemmas that have shaped our national life over the past two decades...
...Order now from: THE WANDERER 201 Ohio Street St...
...It was in Bloomington, in a trailer park, that the magazine was founded (as The Alternative, a counter-salvo to the radical movement at Indiana University) and there it remained and grew for eighteen years, with headquarters first in a farmhouse outside of town, and finally in a walk-up office above the renowned Betty Jean candy shop on the courthouse square...
...Virtually every Corvette registered in 98 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1987 Monroe County therefore returned to a trailer park after an evening of cruising...
...That, for example, Ron Burr and Bob Tyrrell had each lived in trailers...
...On the day a new issue was to be printed, I found that newsprint had been rationed in the Midwest...
...What did I, then a Jack Kennedy-Hubert Humphrey-Adlai Stevenson liberal, learn from Bob Tyrrell and the Jolly Boys at The Alternative...
...What a tease I was, even then...
...When George Nash next updates his history of the contemporary conservative movement, let us hope he acknowledges the colossal debt owed to this Hoosier's Hoosier...
...The official period of mourning is over, and the locals have recovered - nicely from the setback to the mental economy...
...Often that summer I would gather with all the other male members of the Spectator staff in a neighborhood bar to drink enormous amounts of beer and cheer for the Cubs...
...Order Today ! MasterCard and VISA orders call toll-free 1-800-348-2440...
...As for Debra, she took a kind of sisterly liking to me, and throughout the year she set me up with some of the women William McGurn For this suburban Jersey boy there remain two vivid impressions from Bloomington...
...But I do remember thinking, maybe a little melodramatically, that the question itself was a clearsign that I had done something right with my life...
...There is always room, as Orwell wrote, for one more custard pie...
...Enrich your life in only 10 minutes a day with The Catholic One-Year Bible...
...Gone but not forgiven...
...It was plain that despite his admiration for the magazine, he had missed something essential to its character...
...His hamburgers were fried, and the result was gray, greasy, juicy, and delicious...
...At the time, I recall an earnest and enthusiastic reader visiting the office and expressing his chagrin about the location of our anniversary celebration...
...The Masonic Temple dislodged its occupants, installing financial planners and useful tradesmen in offices beyond the solemnity of Solomon...
...29.50 ISBN 0-89874-907-7 VALUE THEORY AND EDUCATION by Peter F. Carbone, Jr...
...There are plenty of magazines around that know everything...
...Booklist Paper, 88.95 David Lloyd George A Political Life By Bentley B. Gilbert "The breadth of [Gilbert's] research, his ability to pull together new information from an enormous range of minor as well as major sources, is phenomenal ....Quite simply the fullest account of Lloyd George's early career that we have had or are ever likely to have...
...I chose a truly foreign country: southern Indiana...
...Sometimes on weekends I would get invited over to their houses, where I would perch on red-vinyl couches, sipping Strohs, and putting in my two-cents' worth on Bobby Knight, guns, or whatever else the topic of conversation happened to be that day...
...That's amazing...
...Bloomington's great contribution to the national gastronomy was a hamburger of timeless dignity...
...Bloomington's best restaurant was run by an ashram started by a Brooklynite named Rudi, short for Rudranadra...
...arms control policy...
...Alumni of the Snopes School of Culinary Art were well represented among greater Bloomington's chefs...
...Oh, everyone," he said with that same self-assurance...
...The birds were my favorite...
...Whit Stillman Bloomington, Monroe County, Indiana in the seventies was the Mecca for sarcastic American right-wingers...
...It was, in short, a great place to work and read...
...The word "Pink" referred not to the leader of the band, but to a "state of mind...
...His patriotism was unvarnished and refreshing in contrast with the attitudes then prevailing across town on the Indiana University campus...
...During those years, the magazine drew into Bloomington a steady freshet of bright young people who shaped the Spectator with their vitality and humor and hard work...
...The courthouse is restored to resplendence, and enterprise quickens all around the square with the old Waldron block gussied up like a Gay Nineties beau...
...Nostalgia can usually be had on the cheap, and for that reason we have dedicated ourselves in this anniversary issue to looking forward, to prognostication and soothsaying, avoiding as far as possible the gooey sentimentality that sometimes smothers such commemorative efforts...
...I never understood what wasn't parallel parking until I saw my first shopping center parking lot...
...Shampoos with honey or wheat-germ...
...One of the priorities of trailer life, moreover, was that the owner's car had to be worth more than his home...
...Perversely, my memories of Bloomington often return to that house...
...Nope, some simpleton had socketed a penny in the master fuse box...
...To order by mail, complete coupon and send to: Our Sunday Visitor / 200 Noll Plaza / Huntington, IN 46750...
...Staged editorial meetings in the hospital room to let the patient feel he was still part of the action...
...The walls of his $75/month Ellettsville farmhouse were emerald green and lined with books...
...It was the very week that the magazine had to be laid out, pasted up, artwork photographed, and completed pages brought to the printer in Indianapolis...
...Kay Boyle It is astonishing that ICodrescu I has produced so regularly, even more that his range is so wide and his imagination so fertile ....Witty, profound, or both at once, his commentaries read as well as they sound...
...Steven C. Munson I spent two and a half years in Bloomington as managing editor of The American Spectator...
...I returned to that site every year, and continued to see the elegant herons...
...Whit Stillman was publisher of The American Spectator in 1978...
...Bloomington's Silver Dollar Disco was far less expensive and snobbish than its New York equivalent—and there was no one to go with...
...I sometimes wonder what happened to the bartender...
...NN'S.N.s.N.s.S.s.•^•^••••^^••••^•%•^ \ Ns.s.'sNs.s.•^•^•^•^N s.NN.Ns...
...I eventually moved in with her, but the arrangement lasted only a week or so because—as that little exchange should have made obvious but somehow didn't—we had completely misunderstood each other...
...rinses with cucumber or egg or milk...
...Judy Mathews Tyrrell When I first met Bob Tyrrell nineteen years ago he was wearing a towel, something he is comfortable in even today...
...The girlfriend was named Debra, and the band was called "Pink and the Naturals...
...John Podhoretz I was 19 when I went to spend the summer in Bloomington, Indiana as an editorial intern for The American Spectator...
...Neil Howe Born and raised in the academic pleasure domes of California, I came to Bloomington in 1972 expecting to set foot on Martian landscape...
...Spectator readers are familiar with Bob Tyrrell's ideas and style...
...He was a nice guy and as far as I know had nothing against The American Spectator, if he thought about it at all...
...No one at The American Spectator sympathized with my plight...
...that even in what seemed to me to be a hick university town, they showed West German movies about homosexual adolescents...
...Accordingly, as a tribute to our Bloomington roots, we have asked some former Hoosiers to recall their days at the magazine and in the Midwest...
...Like all great bartenders, Dave had a talent for listening...
...A provocative and challenging work...
...The bar also provided a kind of soul food for the man in a hurry—cellophane sacks of Tom's Fried Pork Rinds, pickled eggs, and pigs' feet bobbing in stout jars of vinegar and Red Dye No...
...and a music building with a sweeping curve of practice rooms to play piano in...
...Erich Eichman When I first started working for The American Spectator I had already been living in Bloomington for several years...
...At the time, I was renting a room in a run-down, two-story house not far from the campus of Indiana University...
...Every Saturday night I would leave my wallet at home and hike a mile to the drugstore where I would kill a couple ofhours (arguably, given the alternatives, still not a bad way to spend an evening...
...Pink" had originally been music students at Indiana University...
...He was from Michigan and wore an earring...
...One Saturday I was tramping through the woods when, much to my surprise, three great blue herons appeared, flying gracefully in the distant sky...
...Well, that formerly stupid sophomore made the Dean's list and was cured of cancer...
...He is now special assistant to Ambassador Edward Rowny...
...After varying lengths of time they moved on, most of them to jobs in government or journalism, and at last, in 1985, the magazine left too, for a new base in Washington, D.C...
...Zero," I immediately replied...
...22.50 ISBN 0-89874-976-X...
...The Saturday Evening Club (Alpha chapter) gathers to irrevere the personages of the hour, parse each tender platitude, and foretell the obvious...
...indeed, that the Spectator itself had been born in one, just across from the I.U...
...Kent Owen is the Bloomington-based Indiana editor of The American Spectator...
...When I lived with "Pink," they had just embarked upon that rite of passage in which newly minted I.U...
...that Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy is one of the great novels in the English language...
...I'd never seen them before, least not with humans using them as permanent homes...
...Bloomington was not the typical Midwestern backwater—it was "Indiana's Nightclub" and Monroe County the state's "educational and recreational capital...
...There was a pause...
...The problem is whether Westinghouse's dangerous sludge should be burned and blown away—as a federal consent decree orders—or eliminated through technologies yet unknown...
...I just couldn't afford the payments on the Corvette...
...that the place across the street from The American Spectator made the world's best chili dogs...
...A Terrific Gift Idea...
...It soon became apparent that gross length was the sole criterion for the discriminating trailer dweller: Burr, for example, was given to boasting about the day he and John Von Kannon had moved up to a "40-footer," which in Manhattan terms is roughly equivalent to an apartment with hardwood floors and a view of the park...
...Thanks, Bob...
...I slaved for the course, since I was head over heels in love with my teacher...
...For a neophyte like myself it was inspiring...
...its buxom waitresses worked for free and 1817 Celebrate THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR...
...Joseph P Duggan was a summer intern at The Alternative in 1972 and 1975 and assistant managing editor in 1976-77...
...This seriousness of purpose quite comfortably coexisted with and informed the intellectual cutting-up that made the Spectator so entertaining and caught the surprised attention of so many young readers, such as I was, in the early and mid-1970s...
...AFTERMATH No sooner than the last circus wagon had clattered out of town did all the lights gutter and quit...
...I imagined he would be filled with a mixture of nausea at the spectre of excess, and giddy optimism at the sheer variety...
...Toward the end of a forty-five minute phone interview, she said: "Tell me . . . on a scale of zero to ten—zero being completely and utterly conformist and -ten being totally and ruthlessly nonconformist, where would you place yourself...
...Paul, Minnesota 55107 (PLEASE USE ORDER BLANK BELOW) / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1987 97 97 The American Spectator had to go out of town on a family emergency...
...For those not aware of Brown County—an admission that provokes incredulity from people in the area—it is like a little bit of Maine rising from the Midwestern plain, which can really use it...
...I owe myconservatism to Tyrrell's influence...
...Hence local politics is much ado about a good riddance to PCBs as well as to toxic lawyers and technocratic consultants...
...Sad to say, I never got around to buying a trailer myself...
...There was a symbiosis between the old pros and the young proteges, in which ersatz adulation was traded for vicarious glory...
...Adam Meyerson Many of my Yale '74 classmates went off to Oxford or the Peace Corps after graduation...
...This has caused me a great deal of sadness in the years since then...
...Now, since I was a graduate of Notre Dame, this was not my first time on Hoosier soil...
...Now that we are in Washington, a town impressed with power and man-made objects, I often think of that whippoorwill singing every evening outside the general store in Story, Indiana, and how lucky I was to hear him...
...It would be misleading to generalize from the one example of Hinkle's...
...Exp...
...The Catholic One-Year Bible makes daily Bible reading convenient, delightfully easy, and exciting...
...I took the job of typesetting andRichard took the job of layout...
...840.00 When ordering, please add 82.00 for postage and handling...
...The city's vegetarian population was large and its Krieger Titles You Just Can't Miss...
...It didn't have the great street food of New York, and it didn't have the cheap designer clothes of Boston, but it had the biggest drugstore I'd ever seen...
...One evening, a few weeks before The American Spectator moved to Washington, D.C., my best girlfriend and I drove from Bloomington through the rolling hills of Brown County to the village of Story for dinner at an old general store, since converted into a restaurant...
...Malcolm Gladwell I began my stay in Bloomington in the basement of a house owned by a hellish and unusually large woman, who drove an aging Ford pickup which filled my apartment with fumes each time she belched up the driveway...
...His strength and good humor deterred rowdiness...
...s. % •^^^ s. %%%%% \\ %%%% %% \ % %%% S. S. S, • N. %%%% %% / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / %•^•^•^•^^•^•^^••^••••^•^^.‘ THE WANDERER, AN ARDENT SUPPORTER OF THE PAPACY, AND AMERICA'S OLDEST NATIONAL CATHOLIC NEWSPAPER, PROUDLY PRESENTS . . . A BOOK YOU WILL TREASURE "The Pope in America" THE COMPLETE RECORD OF ALL OF THE ADDRESSES GIVEN BY POPE JOHN PAUL II DURING HIS HISTORIC SECOND VISIT TO THE UNITED STATES We expect The Pope In America to be completed and ready for mailing by mid-November...
...All that night I drove through southern Indiana, page proofs in my trunk, looking for a newspress that had extra paper...
...ADULT LEARNING IN AMERICA: Eduard Lindeman and His Agenda for Lifelong Education by David W. Stewart Orig...
...For example, the year I am referring to was actually only seven months...
...News & World Report...
...P.O...
...The land is rocky, hilly, well forested, much of it unfit for any farmer's plow...
...The territory extends as far west as New Harmony, site of Robert Owen's experiment in socialism, and east to Vevay, birthplace of Edward Eggleston, author of The Hoosier Schoolmaster and the first of the great Hoosier writers...
...Strips bare the mythology of aArrisrcholnl" M. Senator Malcolm Wallop and Angelo Codevilla show how 25 years of negotiations and agreements with the Soviet Union promised a safer world but produced precisely the reverse...
...A local bartender lived there for a while, and for a long time another fellow, a native of Indiana, lived on the porch...
...He went on about it for a good chunk of the car ride, and somewhat nervously I asked how many in Bloomington lived in these things...
...It was also a hothouse for every species of pederast, Marxist intellectualoid, and college town charlatan...
...And every evening, as shadows fall across the limestone doughboy and the WCTU drinking fountain, a woman in mauve places a single perfect skunk cabbage on that hallowed doorstep next to the Betty Jean Shop...
...A fitting farewell to incandescence on the cheap...
...I also associate Bloomington with the German language, since I was taking an intensive German class during the time I was there...
...a campus with little streams running through it...
...Then, of course, there was the magazine, something that hardly an inhabitant cared about—not because of what it said, but because it was in writing...
...Elizabeth Kristol, a senior editor of Insight magazine, was The Alternative's historian in 1976...
...For the magazine a side benefit of its Indiana location was the constant revitalization of its staff as the shorttermers—younger and unmarried—left for the East Coast in search of love...
...Indiana University's huge, pleasant library was open to all and open all evening—something New York lacked...
...I don't remember what I replied to my housemate that day...
...Ronald E. Burr What I remember most about Bloomington is the countryside...
...Malcolm Gladwell, a reporter for the Washington Post, was TAS's assistant managing editor in 1984 and early 1985...
...With this warning, here is a "reminiscence": Soon after coming to Bloomington, and needing a place to live, I called a woman who had placed an ad in the local paper, the Bloomington Herald-Telephone...
...I remember him settling into a chair across the room from me one day not long after I had joined the magazine...
...The London Times The first of a three-volume biography of the most influential British statesmen of the twentieth century from his rise to power until the beginning of 1912 when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer...
...Thus did TAS take its leave of the old campgrounds, striking off for the vortex below the Beltway...
...I saw The American Spectator on the newsstand today," he said, looking a little annoyed...
...Probably it would take a Democratic administration at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to uncover how Gib and Denzil's Restaurant was able to extract every vestige of flavor from fresh ingredients...
...The Catholic One-Year Bible (cloth), 214-8, $17.95: Qty The Catholic One-Year Bible (kivar), 215-6, $11.95: Qty The Catholic One-Year Bible Journal, 216-4, $1.95: Qty Subtotal $ Shipping/Handling $ 2.00 Total $ ^ Please send me a free full-line catalog...
...1987 308 pp...
...Ed.1987 432 pp...
...And compassion for the same person eight years later when told he had leukemia...
...That something—dimly apparent, I suspect, even to those who continued to view the Spectator as a college magazine long after it had broken away from Indiana University and gone national—was the kind of intellectualseriousness that makes political journalism effective...
...Box 9542 • Melbourne, FL 32902-9542 (305) 724-9542 96 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1987 vegetarian cuisine unsurpassed...
...Nearly all Americans think Indiana is a vast expanse of flat, endless pastures and cornfields—the kind described in the opening chapter of Booth Tarkington's The Gentleman from Indiana...
...In Bloomington, however, I learned that the trailer is to our day what the log cabin was to Lincoln's...
...Date M/C Bank No 87199 Name Address Apt City State Zip Credit card orders please include phone...
...I was a Blue Jays fan...
...I finally found one somewhere near Bean Blossom, and the issue was ready just about the time the sun was breaking over the plains to the east...
...Elizabeth Kristol Bloomington was the coolest city I ever lived in...
...The other, a man from Texas, was showing signs of becoming a "lifer," that is, someone who would leave Bloomington, if ever, in a box...
...On those warm Bloomington evenings all of us put aside our better instincts to root for the home team...
...Bloomington, before Indiana University grew to behemoth size and adopted pretentious airs, used to call itself the 'Gateway to Southern Indiana...
...The Spectator not only made us laugh and salved our souls by really giving it to the left, it also spoke to our sense that the battle for control of the political culture was no joke at all, but a fight to preserve the values of democracy and decency...
...Of the two graduate students in English in the house—I had been a third—one was, toward the end of my stay there, involved with a professor in an extra-academic way...
...The Spectator itself has followed this migration...
...For a northeastern city boy, my three years with what was then The Alternative offered an introduction to America's "heartland...
...What would a Soviet emigre make of all of this, I always wondered (really, I did...
...Harried phone calls to friends around the country who phoned, wrote, and traveled to the Indianapolis hospital to visit...
...1988 290 pp...
...At bookstores or call toll free (800) 638-3030 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1987 95 slept with their religious master to gain spiritual energy...
...A failure of power, a failure of nerve...
...School wasn't in full swing when I was there, which meant the town was peaceful and the campus a lovely place to hang out...
...He collected food stamps...
...3. Other establishments, of course, offered similar food and drink, but only the Walnut Lounge offered the ministrations of Dave Effingham...
...The Hoosier university town was a place where one could find honest-to-God American food...
...that A&W root beer from the real honest-to-God drive-in is a wondrous delicacy...
...Owning and operating a motor vehicle was a simple matter in Bloomington...
...There I discovered, among other things, how to live on $125 a week (sparingly, even in a small town...
...There was every kind of beauty product you could dream of...
...But the neo-Gothic splendor of Our Lady's campus constitutes almost a state unto itself, rather like the Vatican, and my forays into the Indiana heartland had generally been confined to Lock's Liquor World, Interstate-80, and the Scottsdale Mall...
...I've enclosed my check or money order for $ Or, please charge to my ^ VISA ^ MasterCard Acct...
...The shampoo aisle was my favorite: this was the mid-seventies, when it was imperative to place health foods in products that ended up nowhere near the digestive tract...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1987 99...
...But the dirty little secret about Bob Tyrrell is his compassion...
...Orig...
...Ronald E. Burr is publisher of The American Spectator...
...There was a guileless, stubborn quality to the preparation of bad food in some of Bloomington's diners that leaves me mystified still today...
...I know it was the first time I enjoyed fireworks in a civilized setting, and it may well have been the first time I saw my mother sit on grass...
...THE WANDERER AM-SP 201 Ohio Street — St...
...Rows and rows and rows of the stuff...
...I probably turned the conversation to his unfinished dissertation...
...That principled conservatism could be combined with high spirits, zesty writing, and personal generosity...
...Brahms' Double Concerto filled the air—in fact the elaborate stereo equipment was one of the few pieces of furniture in the rather spacious house...
...I didn't...
...The American Spectator knows this one thing, and, teaching by example, it has changed American politics...
...A Craving for Swan Commentaries as heard on NPR's "All Things Considered" By Andrei Codrescu "With -humor and grace, wisdom and tenderness, Codrescu transforms the commonplace into the miraculous...
...Steven C. Munson, news specials chief at the Voice of America, was managing editor of The American Spectator from mid-1977 through 1979...
...Instead I found a world that clearly had more to do with my country than where I had come from: goodtime stony bars, rattling quarry trucks with no brakes, leather-faced farmers, half an apartment that rented for $37.50 per month with utilities (what does a cup of coffee go for now in New York...
...These discoveries were certainly meaningful, but they paled in comparison to what I was compelled to learn when the production manager of A PERMANENT RECORD - A BEAUTIFUL MEMENTO This attractive book — with a number of strik- r ing photographs of Pope John Paul II during his travels — contains the full texts of all of the Holy Father's addresses given in the United States from Sept...
...Rather, I want to engage in nostalgia on a more personal level about the person who started the magazine and who has kept it going for these twenty years...
...The first is of the town square, with the illuminated clock face set off majestically by the dark Hoosier sky...
...On the 'grounds were the traditional stern monuments to the city's war dead, and just across the street Wiles Drugstore still had a counter where you could sit down and order a vanilla egg cream from Old Man Wiles himself...
...Finally, the permanent staff followed them...
...Pork bellies hold steady...
...Nature predominates here, and you can see fox, deer, raccoon, squirrel, and a wide variety of birds...
...And thumbs her nose...
...fortunately, though, a year at The American Spectator cultivates the aptitude for apocrypha necessary to replace it...
...Each reading offers a selection from the Old and New Testaments, Psalms, and Proverbs...
...Krieger Publishing Co., Inc...
...I recall her finally exclaiming...
...SPECIAL PRE-PUBLICATION PRICE: $800 (POSTPAID) THIS OFFER WILL END DECEMBER 1ST...
...10th to 19th, 1987...
...Bad housing was available at reasonable prices—unlike New York...
...John Podhoretz, a TAS summer intern in 1980, is a contributing editor of U.S...
...For five nights we worked until the wee hours, my fingers flying across the keyboard of the typesetter, endlessly correcting misspellings and misplaced punctuation, Richard continually going back into the stat room ,to re-shoot one of the half-tone illustrations...
...You hardly noticed the university, except for the stray bell-bottoms you noticed in the most unlikely part of town...
...Congressman Jack Kemp 220 pages, $16.95 cloth At bookstores, ICS Press, institute for Contemporary Studies, or direct from 243 Kearny Street, San Francisco, CA 94108 IE§ (415) 981-5353 For the thinking reader...
...Being in Bloomington—a place as far away spiritually as it was physically from the source of leftist thinking—made it possible for the Spectator to emerge with a fresh, energetic, and independent voice...
...In between are such sites as Buzzard's Roost, the famous caves at Wyandott, the virgin forest of Spring Mill State Park, and the falls of the Blue River in Milltown...
...Most writers and staff—current and former —are familiar with his, ah, shall we say, eccentricities...
...The rest of the staff lived in renovated farm houses and fancy apartments built in Bloomington's version of the international style, which meant they were designed in Indianapolis...
...Some rooms were labeled...
...The entire Living Bible text is divided into 365 pre-measured daily readings...
...I sound like I disliked Bloomington...
...For my most memorable evening, I thank Richard Nixon's price controls...
...That meant I had instant access to the largest selection of books on corn-husking and 'coon-hunting in the continental U.S., but the bad news was that my building was also home to Bloomington's only two punk rockers, who capped their nightly imitations of angry British youth by puking all over the stairs...
...We flatter ourselves, however, that the magazine retains as one of its primary purposes the preservation of the mundane Midwestern values of common sense, individualism, and general cussedness...
...And it was Debra who first pointed out to me that "therapist" is "the rapist" pushed together, and that "mentor" is "torment" transposed...
...Adam Meyerson, editor of Policy Review, was managing editor of The Alternative from 1974 to 1977...
...Zbigniew Brzezinski "Senator Wallop and Angelo Codevilla are confronting questions that others just sweep under the rug...
Vol. 20 • December 1987 • No. 12
