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Giant Ice Cream Cone and invented geography
Date: 10-25-2005
By: Bill Bucko
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WARNING! This post contains trivia!
Hello, I've just listened to the "Giant Ice Cream Cone" program. I can't comment on whether the giant cone really existed. I can, though, state with assurance that the geography is (at least in part) invented.
Shep specifies the time of the incident as when he was about 9 years old -- therefore, around 1930.
He says his house was on the "outskirts" of town. That's probably not an unreasonable description. Even in the 1950s and 60s Kennedy Avenue (Hessville's main north-south thoroughfare) had a great many empty lots. Though the original (wooden) Harding School had just been built, Hessville's major expansion (east of Harding) didn't get underway till the early 60s. (I still remember one oddity Shep would have enjoyed: "The Talking House," a new structure wired for sound, to sell visitors on the wonders of prefab housing. "How old are you?" you'd say, and a voice would answer from a hidden microphone: "I'm brand new!")
Now, Shep says the ice cream cone was built about a half mile down a road he lived near. The only main streets that he could mean are Kennedy Avenue and 165th Street.
He further specifies:
a shopping center has been built there now;
it was near a river (though nobody ever caught fish there);
there was a baseball diamond.
The "shopping center" eliminates north on Kennedy, south on Kennedy, and west on 165th. Half a mile north on Kennedy, you find Mabel's Diner (the current site of Flick's Tavern), and a few other small businesses--that's all. Half a mile south on Kennedy, you'd be approaching Hessville's main business district, centered (in the 1950s) around the Ace Theater (now the Kennedy) and Fifield's Pharmacy. Again, you wouldn't describe that as a shopping center. Half a mile west on 165th, across the tracks, you'd be where the American Can Co. factory was built in 1957. Beyond that, also on the north side of the street was a large open prairie where my family's dogs chased rabbits. To the north of the prairie was the IHB freight yard, and to the west a huge junkyard (still there) at the intersection of Summer Street and Indianapolis Blvd. Some of that land is still vacant, today. Nothing like a shopping center.
OK, east on 165th, I believe there IS a shopping center (near the ersatz "Morton High School" they built in 1968 to "replace" the REAL Morton H.S. I and the girl I love attended (at 170th--171st Street, 1 block west of Kennedy Ave.)
However, what about the river?? Nowhere near! The closest river is the Grand Calumet, at least 1 1/2 miles north on Kennedy Avenue. No baseball diamond. It was surrounded by the Shell Oil Co. refinery and tank farm, US Lead Refining, and Harbison Walker Refractories. Which explains why the river DID catch on fire, from time to time!
SO ... I think it's fair to say that, great storyteller that he was, Shep added a liberal dose of imagination to any real-life incidents he chose to describe.
Bill Bucko
Warren G. Harding Class of '63 |
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