The Gambling Kingpin's Country Hideaway

This Gazette article from 1978 introduced me to a once-notorious Hobart resident whom I had never heard of before:


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Hobart Gazette, 29 Mar. 1978

This article included enough information (home on Lake George, reached by a private road from 61st Avenue) for me to identify a likely location for Fred Mackey's home, and reference to the 1972 Plat Book confirmed that I had the right place:


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According to one newspaper article, the house cost $200,000 when it was built[1] — per the county records, in 1958. That would be about $2.2 million in today's money.[2]

Here is an aerial view of the house from 1978:


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Image from the Lake County Surveyor GIS Website.

That's a lot of driveway to plow in the winter, isn't it? But I'm sure Fred could afford to hire someone to do that.

The recent construction of the Amber Creek subdivision has eaten up some of the private road, making the property only slightly less isolated.

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Fred Mackey's murder made the front page of the Sunday Post-Tribune, which ran this article summarizing his career in Gary:



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"Gary Policy Baron Murdered," Post-Tribune (Gary, Ind.), 26 Mar. 1978.

His story seems to be the classic American success story gone awry, something like Al Capone's: poor boy works his way to millionaire status, but on the wrong side of the law. Like Al, Fred seems to have been known for his generosity to poor people. Also like Al, Fred went to prison for tax evasion, not for the criminal activity that built his wealth.

My research in the online newspapers did not reveal that anyone was ever convicted of Fred's murder, although police did have suspects.[3]

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Among the property Fred owned, according to one source, was a "farm in Arkansas."[4] Was it the farm where he had been born in 1902? I wish I knew — I can't find any on-line plat maps for Hickory Ridge Township, Phillips County, Arkansas, to figure that out. But let's visit that farm, and see what else we can find out about Fred's background from the census and other records, shall we?

The 1900 Census shows his parents on the farm where Fred would be born two years later. In May 1900, 37-year-old Bruce Mackey married 16-year-old Jennie Davis. The census, taken the next month, shows the newlyweds along with Bruce's two sons, 18 and 16 years of age, from his previous marriage.[5] The household also includes a boarder. Bruce owned the farm himself.

The enumerator of the 1910 Census may have made a mistake: Bruce and Jennie's oldest child is listed as an 8-year-old daughter named Leler, who is never heard from again. That probably should have been an 8-year-old son named Fred. Jennie and Bruce had four more children by then (Bruce Jr., Ruby, Fanny, and Bob).

By the 1920 Census — if we can trust the enumerator — Fred, 18, had left the family farm in Arkansas. But where he went and what he was doing, I do not know. The rest of his family, which now included three more children, was still on the farm.

The next trace I can find of Fred is in September 1929, when he appears in this list of Lake County, Indiana court cases (compiled by Hobart's own Alvina Killigrew):


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Alvina M. Killigrew (comp.), "County Court Calendars," Lake County Times (Hammond, Ind.), 26 Sept. 1929.

And so the 1930 Census records Fred as a prisoner in the "Indiana Reformatory" in Madison County. By then, his parents and some siblings had come up north to Gary. His parents ran a grocery store and lived with their daughter, Fannie, and her husband, Ardie Jenkins (a medical doctor).

By 1940 Fred was free again, living in Gary with his widowed mother (along with other family members, including his now-divorced sister, Fannie) and working in an unspecified "mill." But two years later, we find Fred as some kind of entrepreneur, a member of his own firm:


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Image from Ancestry.com.

This may have been his first insurance firm. In a 1948 Gary directory,[6] we find him listed as an insurance agent. Sometime between 1942 and 1948 he married Ella Esmond.

He was the proprietor of an insurance company in the 1950 Census. He was also father: his five-year-old son, Fred Jr., was living with him — but his wife was not, apparently. At least, she is not recorded there. A widowed woman was boarding in Fred's house.

In the online newspapers, I came across the son's name a few times in connection with high-school sports in the early to mid-1960s. He was on the track team at Roosevelt High School in Gary.

In 1957, per the county records, Fred built the Gibraltar Building. In 1958, as mentioned above, he built the limestone house on Lake George.

And that brings us nearly to the start of his legal troubles, where the Post-Tribune article above picked up. I would like to know more about the missing years, but I don't suppose I ever will. I'm not the person to tell that story, anyway, given that I know absolutely nothing about illegal gambling in Gary. And very little about legal gambling anywhere.


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[1] David Mannweiler, "To Many, It Was More Than Just a House ("IRS Auction Set")," Indianapolis News, 17 Mar. 1975.
[2] Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI Inflation Calculator, https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl.
[3] "Ex-Gang Leader Linked to Slaying," Times (Hammond, Ind.), 15 June 1978; "Lake Drops Charges," Times, 15 May 1979.
[4] Mannweiler, supra.
[5] Per a family tree on Ancestry.com, in 1881 Bruce married Josie Woods, who died in 1885.
[6] Polk's Gary (Lake County, Ind.) City Directory 1948 (Detroit: R.L. Polk & Co., 1948), via Ancestry.com.

Tornado v. Gas Station

Back when I posted about the Illiana Hotel sign in the bottom of a ravine, a reader suggested that it might have been blown there by a tornado that demolished a gas station at Route 30 and Randolph. The gas station, so I understand, had a number of signs like that on the walls.

I recently came across the Gazette story about the tornado and the gas station:


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Elsewhere the business was described as a "general store and gas station owned by Frank Horan,"[1] whom I can't identify with greater specificity.

On this 1958 aerial view, we find some kind of building already in existence on that corner (marked with a red arrow):


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Image from the Indiana State Archives.

Here's an aerial view from 1978:


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Image from the Lake County Surveyor GIS Website.

It doesn't look as if the gas station had been rebuilt, but the resolution of the image is not good. There is something about the size of a semi-trailer sitting on the lot. [9/17/2024 update: A long-time local resident tells me that Frank did not rebuild after the tornado. The land stood vacant until recently. The gas station/store had been very small, with one gas pump and, inside, a counter, some shelves with bread, candy, and cigarettes, along with a little cooler for such things as soda. Frank made much of his money repairing tires for semis traveling on Route 30. The family lived in the back of the building.]

The furthest I can go back in Google street view is 2009, at which time there was no sign that anything had ever been built on that corner.

(By the way, I have totally failed to identify the Hickory Grove Farm on the Old Lincoln Highway near County Line Road, also mentioned in the Gazette article above.)

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This is the first time in my 15 years of blogging that I'm indexing the surname Horan, and yet, looking at the census records, I find them in Union Township, Porter County, as early as 1930. And in the 1950 Census, there is a whole crowd of them there:


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Image from Ancestry.com.

In Center Township, the name goes back to the 19th century. However, as I said, I've not been able to determine whether Frank Horan, of the demolished gas station, was related to any Porter County Horans.


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[1] "Tornado Kills DeMotte Resident," Vidette-Messenger (Valparaiso, Ind.), 13 Mar. 1976.

The Further Adventures of Don Nixie

Or: Please Don’t Tell My Daddy I Collaborated With Lawrence Welk

In a recent post I shared what I had just learned about the musical talents of Donald Niksch, who began his commercial endeavors with a song self-published under the name Don Nixie. Since the time of that post, Ruth Markovich (Trinity Lutheran Church historian) has been on the case, and has tracked down additional information, including (from a source who prefers to remain anonymous) some materials from a booklet that Don himself put together circa 1960, perhaps for his own family. The booklet's table of contents lists many of the songs he wrote, and includes an image from his manuscript of "When It's Springtime Back Home Again":


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Image courtesy of an anonymous source.

From my point of view, that list has a couple of puzzling omissions — two songs mentioned in a 1954 newspaper item in my previous post: "Hobart, U.S.A., Our Old Hometown," and "Buzz, Buzz, I'm A Little Love Bug." Perhaps the news item was mistaken about Don's having written those songs? Or … perhaps … he wanted to erase them from history!?!

The booklet excerpts I was given included the sheet music for a song called, "Please Don't Tell My Daddy," with a surprising name in the credits:


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Image courtesy of an anonymous source.

The song was written in 1946, by which time Lawrence Welk had already made a name for himself as the leader of a "big band" that had performed around the country. During the 1940s he and his band were regularly featured at Chicago venues.

How did Don Niksch, from Hobart, Indiana, get involved with this famous musician? Fortunately, Don himself tells us, in this excerpt from a three-page essay he wrote in 1960 about his songwriting activities:

When Lawrence Welk and his Champagne Music Orchestra appeared at the Aragon Ballroom in Chicago, I sent him a novelty tune entitled PLEASE DON'T TELL MY DADDY. In a few days I received a letter from Lawrence saying he liked the song very much and that I should call him at my convenience to discuss the composition. I called at his home and Lawrence and I worked on the song together making changes which he thought necessary. After two weeks the orchestra performed it at the Aragon Ballroom to a very enthusiastic audience as the song was broadcasted coast to coast over the Mutual Broadcasting System. I have a record of that broadcast and Jayne Walton, the Champagne Lady, usually reserved in her presentation, did a good job with the material although it was not her type of song. It was set for recording but since it is so important to couple the correct artist with the right material, the recording was never made.

You may read Don's full essay here.

Evidently Don's songwriting adventures went further than I ever suspected.

I have been looking around on the internet for any recordings, but no luck so far.

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Ruth Markovich also passed along to me a page from the Trinity Lutheran Church record books, with the marriage of Donald Niksch and Ruth Nagel written in, as it would have been had the person in charge in 1944 not inadvertently omitted it:


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Image courtesy of Ruth Markovich.

It's interesting to see all the other names on that page — so many familiar ones!

Levi Bowman, 1906-1956

I have been hearing about Bowman's Landing for years, so this obituary caught my eye:


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Hobart Gazette, 2 Aug. 1956.

I was surprised to read that Levi Bowman had been running the business for only about six years when he died. From the way people talk about it, I thought it had been operating for a quarter-century, at least.

I've been too busy this past week to collect my thoughts, much less do any research, so I'm just slapping this up as a low-effort post — well, I did do enough research to satisfy my own curiosity as to whether Levi was related to the Bowmans who've been showing up in the "South of Deepriver" columns I used to post, and I found that indeed he was. Levi himself is mentioned in a 1920 column, and the S.E. Bowman mentioned in, for instance, a 1922 column was his father, Samuel Edward.

I really ought to dig up more information about the Bowman family, and I will … someday. But not today.