Word: hoosier
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...Midwestern version of New Jersey to Chicago's New York (with Gary thrown in as Newark). Even when Indianapolis acquired the Colts in 1984, it was done in an underhanded way, the team stealing out of Baltimore in the middle of the night in trailer trucks, something the Hoosier capital has never really been able to live down...
...Bears fan in pre-Colts Indianapolis - the first NFL game my father ever took me to see was at Soldier Field - I've never been as ardent a fan of Peyton Manning's crew as my younger brother is (or my son, whom I've gladly let my Hoosier relatives turn into a Colts enthusiast). But today I can't help feeling that the balance of urban cachet back home along I-65 has changed to a certain, positive extent. Indianapolis may never be Chicago, but it's certainly no longer the underachieving city I once left for Chicago...
Shelbyville, a town of almost 18,000 located on the outer fringe of the "doughnut" counties that ring Indianapolis, seems an unlikely battleground in the war on dropouts. Despite a few oddities--it's home to both the oldest living Hoosier and the world's tallest woman--it is an otherwise pleasantly unremarkable town. The capital is just a short drive away, but miles of rust-colored farmland, mainly cornfields waiting for seed, give the area a rural tinge. Most people live in single-family houses with yards and fences. Not many of them are very well off, but there...
Shelbyville leaders hope to change the prevailing mentality. At a cavernous high school gym in nearby Columbus, I watched the boys' basketball sectional semifinal with Shelbyville mayor Scott Furgeson. The Shelbyville Golden Bears' 21-0 regular season record had turned the town's usual Hoosier hysteria into Hoosier histrionics. As his constituents cheered on the good kids--the lithe, clean-cut basketball players who were dominating Columbus North High School--Furgeson paused to think about the other kids. Before becoming mayor, he spent 22 years managing the local Pizza King franchise. Every year he had to hire...
...edge of Shelbyville's Old Town square, now a roundabout with a paved parking lot in the middle, there's a statue of one of central Indiana's most famous literary characters, a sort of Hoosier Huck Finn named Little Balser. The main character of The Bears of Blue River, a book for adolescents set in the woods of frontier-era Shelby County, Balser spends his days striking off into the wilderness, slaying countless bears (and even an Indian or two) and worrying his parents sick. He is the prototype of an American teenager, a combustible combination of independence...