Happy Birthday Booth

Wednesday is the anniversary of the birth of Hoosier author Booth Tarkington, who was born in Indianapolis on July 29, 1869. Although best known as a writer and a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Tarkington had a brief, but eventful, career as an Indiana legislator.

Marion County voters faced a dizzying array of choices in the March 1902 Republican primary. Nineteen GOP candidates were vying for the seven spots available to the county in the Indiana House of Representatives. When the dust settled the leading vote getter, polling 10,733 tallies,was a rookie in the fiercely competitive world of Hoosier politics--Tarkington.

The stunning success enjoyed at the polls by this political neophyte was explained rather succinctly by one Washington Township farmer: “We voted for him [Tarkington] as a sort of experiment. The paper said he’s a play writer and some kind of an actor, and we just want to see what sort of a gosh derned fool he’ll make of himself in the Legislature.”

Tarkington’s lackluster campaign provided plenty of opportunities for the farmer’s amusement. “I would as soon be sent to jail as to have to make a speech,” said Tarkington, who buttressed his point by delivering only a few talks (lasting mere minutes in length) during his election effort.

Safely ensconced in the Indiana General Assembly following his triumph over his Democratic opponent, Tarkington won the respect of his fellow legislators. The thirty-three-year-old writer and freshman lawmaker took on his party’s chief elected state official, Governor Winfield T. Durbin, in a bitter battle involving the governor’s attempt to oust the Jeffersonville Reformatory board. Tarkington led the opposition to the so-called Ripper Bill and succeeded in defeating Durbin’s move to replace the old board with his hand-picked cronies.

Having proved himself to be always good for a laugh during the campaign, Tarkington at first appeared to follow the same route in the Indiana General Assembly. Early in the session, fellow Republican Charles Warren Fairbanks asked Tarkington to place his name in nomination for the U.S. Senate. Overwhelmed by such an honor falling upon a freshman legislator, a puzzled Tarkington asked a friend why Fairbanks had selected him. “He’s so sure of being elected,” the friend responded, “he wants to show everybody that nothing on earth can stop him.” After finishing his nominating speech, Tarkington caught a glimpse of his father in the packed galleries. “His face was suffused and I had the unfilial impression that he was trying not to laugh contagiously,” Tarkington remembered.

The chuckles at his expense stopped, however, when Tarkington engaged in a bitter fight over legislation backed by Governor Durbin that would have removed the board at the Jeffersonville Reformatory, which somehow had displeased Indiana’s chief executive. This naked grab for power came after a campaign that saw the GOP pledging to keep politics out of running state institutions. At first, Tarkington led a lonely fight to stop what became known as the Ripper Bill, which had already made its way successfully through the state senate. But the supposedly inexperienced legislator rallied others to his cause, including a good portion of the House’s Marion County delegation.

Tarkington’s principled stand worked; the governor’s forces capitulated in a “secret” meeting held on January 27, 1903, at Indianapolis’s English Hotel. In order to avoid what would be a humiliating defeat, Durbin had agreed to a compromise (actually total subjugation on his part) whereby the old bill was shelved for legislation providing that the reformatory’s superintendent and board could only be removed by the governor following the filing of written charges and a hearing. The insurgents, as Tarkington proclaimed the bill’s opponents, “dictated the terms of surrender, which (it was tactily agreed) should be called, for political measures and out of courtesy, ‘a compromise.’”

Although there had been calls for him to run for mayor of Indianapolis, Tarkington had decided to run for the Indiana Senate, or, if that failed, to return to the Indiana General Assembly as a state representative. But after returning from his French Lick Springs vacation, Tarkington was struck by typhoid fever. The illness cut short the writer’s promising life in politics, but his stint in the state legislature did provide Tarkington with enough inside material to produce numerous short stories on politics’ inner workings, which were collected in the publication In the Arena: Stories of Political Life (1905).

The Flight of Liberty Bell 7

On this date in 1961 Hoosier astronaut Virgil I. "Gus" Grissom became the second American and the third human to rocket into space as a Redstone rocket blasted his Libert Bell 7 spacecraft into a suborbital flight lasting approximately fifteen minutes.

Grissom's flight, however, is best known today for what happened after he successfully splashdowned in the Atlantic Ocean. As I noted in my biography of Grissom, written as part of the Indiana Historical Society Press's Indiana Biography Series, the astronaut was lying flat on his back waiting for the helicopter’s call that it had hooked onto the spacecraft, Grissom turned his attention for a second to the knife he had placed in his survival pack, wondering if he could carry it out with him as a souvenir instead of leaving it in the spacecraft. “I heard the hatch blow—the noise was a dull thud—and looked up to see blue sky out the hatch and water start to spill over the doorsill,” he told National Aeronautics and Space Administration officials. Acting on instinct, Grissom quickly tossed his helmet to the floor, grabbed the right side of the instrument panel, and exited the spacecraft. “I have never moved faster in my life,” he noted. “The next thing I knew I was floating high in my suit with the water up to my armpits.”

Inside NASA there existed “two vehement camps” with opinions on what happened. One side believed Grissom had either panicked or hit the switch by accident, causing the hatch to blow. Another faction pointed to some unknown problem with the machine and held the astronaut blameless for the accident.

The debate on the question of whether or not Grissom was to blame for the hatch’s firing seemed about to be put to rest for good in May 1999 when Curt Newport, whose twin passions as a child had been spaceflight and undersea exploration, found the long-abandoned spacecraft on the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. In July, Newport, joined by Guenter Wendt, a German engineer known as the "Pad Leader" by American astronauts and Jim Lewis, the helicopter pilot on the original Liberty Bell 7 recovery, returned to the site and, at 2:15 a.m. July 20—thirty-eight years almost to the day it had been blasted into space—hoisted the capsule off of the ocean floor and onto the deck of the ship Ocean Project.

As a restoration team at the Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center cleaned and reassembled the spacecraft’s 27,000 separate parts, they discovered some intriguing material to help the case that Grissom had not panicked on his flight and prematurely blown the hatch. The museum team, which completed its work in March 2000, discovered Grissom’s waterlogged checklist, which had been about a third of the way completed before the hatch blew. “As far as I’m concerned, that checklist pretty much cleared Grissom of any wrongdoing in connection to what happened,” said John Glass, who supervised the capsule’s restoration at the Cosmosphere.

In addition, Greg “Buck” Buckingham, a key figure in the restoration effort, pointed out that there were no burn marks from the explosive cord that had been intended to trigger the hatch’s release. If the explosive cord never detonated, Buckingham theorized that the spacecraft had slammed hatch-down into the ocean when it returned to earth, causing a titanium strip along the hatch sill to buckle and the seventy explosive bolts to fire one by one. “Most telltale to me are the lack of burn marks,” said Buckingham.

Nominees Named for New Indiana Authors Award

The inaugural Eugene and Marilyn Glick Indiana Authors Award recipient has been named. Indiana native James Alexander Thom was chosen as the national recipient, and finalists in all categories were named. The winning author in the regional and emerging author categories will each be named on September 26 among the finalists.

This new award seeks to recognize the contributions of Indiana authors to the literary landscape in Indiana and across the nation by the Indianapolis-Marion County Public Library Foundation, and is funded by the generosity of The Glick Fund, a fund of Central Indiana Community Foundation.

Nominations were submitted from across the state in early spring. Any published writer who was born in Indiana or has lived in Indiana for at least five years was eligible. A seven-member, statewide Award Panel selected the national winner and finalists in three categories from the pool of publicly nominated authors:

• National Author - $10,000 prize: a writer with Indiana ties, but whose work is known and read throughout the country. National authors were evaluated on their entire body of work. Winner: James Alexander Thom; Finalists: Scott Russell Sanders and Margaret McMullan

• Regional Author - $7,500 prize: A writer who is well-known and respected throughout the state of Indiana. Regional authors were evaluated on their entire body of work. Finalists: Jared Carter, James H. Madison and Susan Neville

• Emerging Author - $5,000 prize: A writer with only one published book. Emerging authors were evaluated on their single published work. Finalists: Kathleen Hughes, Christine Montross and Greg Schwipps

Award finalists in all three categories will be honored on September 26, 2009 at the Central Library in downtown Indianapolis. The day’s events will include free public programming such as author lectures, “how to get published” workshops for aspiring writers, and more. An award dinner/fund raiser benefiting the Library Foundation will follow that evening where the winner of the Regional Author and Emerging Author categories will each be named. Thom will serve as the dinner’s keynote speaker. Ticket information for the award dinner is available by contacting the Library Foundation at (317) 275-4700.