Lulu Is Going to a Big Dance Tonight

About 112 years ago today, Lulu was looking forward with excitement to a "big dance" in the evening.


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I say about 112 years because I'm not completely sure about the postmark. It looks most like 1913 to me, but it could also be 1916 or 1918. Here's a high-resolution scan:



For the sake of completeness, here's the front of the postcard …



… but clearly it's just a generic postcard that merchants could have printed up with the name of their town stamped in the designated space. It was probably cheaper than the postcards with photos of Hobart scenes.


The postcard's recipient, Ada Watts, had been born in 1894 to John and Zilla Watts. The family lived and farmed in Washington Township, Porter County. This 1895 plat map is the earliest I could find showing John and Zilla's farm:


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Image from https://www.inportercounty.org/Data/Maps/1895Plats/Washington-1895.jpg.


The Watts family had ties to Ross Township, going back at least to 1850. (I am going to have to do a separate post on the Wattses.)

Ada lived on her parents' farm through the 1910 Census, but by 1920 had moved to Valparaiso and was working as a saleswoman. In 1922 she married Eugene Taylor Nowlin. In 1930 the two of them were back in Washington Township, running a dairy farm. The 1940 Census shows them still living on a farm, but Taylor had become an automobile dealer by then. I don't know who was doing the farming: their son, Irvin, was only 11 years old, and Taylor's father, living with them, described himself as a "retired farmer." Ada herself was a "housewife."

Eight years later, Taylor's life was cut short by a railroad accident during a snowstorm:


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"Meets Death at Rail Crossing," Vidette-Messenger (Valparaiso, Ind.), 23 Jan. 1948.

The 1950 Census tells us that the widowed Ada (still in Washington Township) went to work as a cook making lunches in a public school, while Irvin, 21 years old, worked in a steel mill.

In 1959, Ada married Laurence Thatcher.[1] They were together for 21 years — only one year less than her first marriage. Still, when their marriage was ended by her death in 1981, she was buried beside her first husband.


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"Obituaries," Vidette-Messenger (Valparaiso, Ind.), 23 Feb. 1981.

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So that's Ada, our postcard's recipient. What about its sender, Lulu? She hasn't given us her surname, to tell us who she was. We're going to have to guess.

My money is on Lulu Strong. Why? — because that's the only Lulu I know.

But seriously, not only were Lulu and Ada somehow related (Lulu's grandmother had been a Watts), the two young women were friends. For example, I find in my newspaper notes a mention of Lulu Strong making the trip out from Hobart to visit Ada's family in 1911: "Mr. and Mrs. Melvin Guernsey, Fred Hillman, Harry Phillips, Harry Moran, Ross Guernsey and Lulu Strong attended a party at John Watts near Coburg[2] Saturday night. They made the trip by auto."[3]

Lulu Strong would have been about 18 in 1913, when the postcard was sent: prime dancing age. All the more so if the postmark is actually 1916 or 1918. It wasn't until December 1919 that she settled down and became Mrs. John Aley. Which didn't mean that her dancing days were over, anyway.

I hope she had fun at her big dance.


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[1] "Thatcher-Nowlin November Nuptials Just Revealed," Vidette-Messenger (Valparaiso, Ind.), 5 Jan. 1960.
[2] You can see Coburg on the 1895 plat map above. Steve Shook has written up the story of that lost village.
[3] "Personal Mention," Hobart News, 2 Nov. 1911. If there was only one auto involved, it must have been crowded. By the way, "Mrs. Melvin Guernsey" was Lulu's sister, Verna.

The Great Mayonnaise Derailment of '83

(Also: Junk in the Woods)

I have been hoping to find this story[1] ever since Eldon Harms told me about a derailment on the Grand Trunk, where local residents who came to gawk at the wreckage walked away with all the mayonnaise they could carry. And why not? It would only go to waste otherwise, wouldn't it?

The story is told in the Hobart Gazette of July 6, 1983, as part of a larger story about massive rainfall and flooding.


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Junk in the Woods: A Photo Essay

On a possibly related note, here are some pictures I took last fall of the junk in the woods of Deep River County Park, on the south side the train tracks, between the river and County Line Road. This junk may or may not be left over from the Great Mayonnaise Derailment of '83.

Some of these pictures include a 22-pound dog for scale.


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On the north side of the tracks in the same area, there is a rusty hunk of metal that looks like a car engine, but it's way up high on the steep embankment and I wasn't going to climb up there (much less walk out there on the tracks) to take a picture.


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[1] I had a little trouble finding it because Eldon remembered it as having occurred in the 1970s, and it didn't turn up in any of the online newspapers I searched.

Comets at Sunset ca. 1972

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The Ainsworth vintage-car expert tells me that the cars in the foreground are 1972 or 1973 Mercury models, while the cars in the background are Comets.

On the back of the card, Art Hill is bragging about the "NEW TOWN of Merrillville" — the town was officially incorporated in 1971.




I think the photo was taken at sunset. The photographer was facing south-southwest. Could you get that artistic-looking sky in that direction at sunset? It would be a chore to get up at sunrise just to take a picture. No, it was sunset, and after taking the photo the photographer went to get something to eat at the York Steak House in Southlake Mall.

Here's a present-day view of the same building (more or less), which was built in 1972 per the county records:


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Image from Google street view.

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I monitor collectibles for sale on Ebay that relate to both Merrillville and Hobart. The difference between what turns up in my searches for each is striking. Most of the items relating to Merrillville involve commerce in the 1970s through 1990s. A lot of the collectibles are ticket stubs from performances at the Star Theater. On a few occasions I have come across items that go further back. But those are rare treats.

For Hobart, it's the opposite. Postcards from the first half of the 20th century are so abundant that I find myself passing up images that I already have an original of (unless the message on the back is particularly interesting) and I've even found things even going back to the 19th century. And yet the two towns are roughly the same age. Merrillville, I believe, was much smaller throughout much of its history, until the population boom of the 1950s. And, again, it wasn't officially a town until 1971.

Merrillville today seems a sprawling anthill of commerce and traffic. It doesn't have a downtown on a human scale, the way Hobart does. It doesn't have a central figure, like a mayor. It doesn't have an emblematic topographical feature, like Hobart's Lake George.

If you want to buy a car, though, you have a lot of choices in Merrillville.

Does it sound like I'm maligning Merrillville? Heaven forbid, after the hundreds or thousands of hours I've spent in its library and its historical museum, not to mention its Menards and Meijer! Also, part of Deep River County Park is technically in Merrillville. So how could I not love it?

The Hobart Historical Society's New Blog

The Hobart Historical Society finally has its own website, with a blog that will include articles on local history topics as well as Historical Society news. I am adding a permanent link to my sidebar.

The Hobart Historical Society is a treasure in the cultural life of our city, run by a core of dedicated volunteers who give enormous amounts of their time and energy to keeping the doors open, refreshing the exhibits, and improving the resources. It receives remarkable support from Hobartites, and even ex-Hobartites across the country — those who no longer live here but still have a place in their hearts for this little city by the millpond.

It also has an Ainsworth file!