An Indiana City With an Average Past Anxiously Faces an Uncertain Future
By Libby Copeland
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, May 6, 2008
MUNCIE, Ind.
In the 1920s, two amateur sociologists went searching for a city that was singularly unexceptional. They wound up here.
They made a study of Muncie, asking its children how often they read, and its women how often they ironed. Then more sociologists came, and market researchers and documentarians and journalists, poking and prodding over the decades, measuring Muncie with the calipers of their trades.
And the people here took it with characteristic good humor, except for the rare occasions when they wanted to run some pointy-headed jerk out of town. They understood why people came. America was nostalgic for a city like this, for a solid Midwestern community that called itself "America's Home Town."
Only now, Muncie is nostalgic for itself.
* * *
On the eve of the Indiana primary, does Muncie have anything to tell America? (And is it sick of being asked?)
"I don't know what to tell you about Muncie, but it's a dying town," says Ron Cantrell, working the cash register of a dusty liquor store on the south side of town, where things are bleakest. "It's almost dead. It's like a cockroach lying there with its legs in the air."
Muncie looks okay from certain angles, kind of like America. North of the White River, which bisects Muncie, things are pretty good. There's Ball State University and Ball Memorial Hospital, both large employers. There's Muncie Mall and the big-box stores, and -- why would anyone shop in Muncie's historic downtown anymore? How could those little shops possibly compare with Wal-Mart?
South of the river is the industrial part of town, and this is where you see the frayed seams of the Rust Belt. Here are the slumped houses, the abandoned fast-food joint, the wreckage of a leveled auto parts plant. Manufacturing jobs, long the backbone of the city's economy, have been leaving. Muncie has lost more than 10,000 people since 1980, and the population is now 66,000.
There are establishments on the south side that are little more than squat boxes with barred windows, built entirely for function and not a bit for beauty. One of these is the store where Cantrell works, which used to have two cash registers and now has one because there isn't that much business anymore. He sells cheap vodka and Natural Ice beer to people who walk and sway and shuffle in.
Cantrell, 51, says he'll be voting Democratic this election. He's not sure for whom yet, but Democratic for sure. Hillary or that guy, whatever his name is.
"As far as I'm concerned, the Republicans have turned things to [expletive]," he says. "I'm working two jobs now just so I can put gas in my van."
Cantrell talks about what it was like when his dad came up from the South, like so many others, to work in the parts plants in Muncie. How the city was thriving then. If people think this is Middle America, he says, they're wrong. Muncie doesn't represent Middle America anymore.
Probably.
"Well, I hope Middle America is a little better than what's around here," he says. "Otherwise, that's depressing."
* * *
What a burden, being average.
When Robert and Helen Lynd happened upon Muncie in 1924, looking for a place to study the effects of industrialization, they liked the city because it was "middle-of-the-road," they wrote, without "outstanding peculiarities or acute local problems." Not too big, not too small; not too hot or too cold. Not on either coast, but smack in the Midwest, which seemed more quintessentially American to the Lynds, somehow. For the purposes of their study, they named it Middletown.
Muncie was not truly average or typical in the literal sense. It had fewer immigrants than most Midwestern cities of its size, and what black population there was, the Lynds utterly ignored in their surveys.
But when the book "Middletown" came out in 1929, it became a national bestseller, and many Americans came to feel that Muncie was Anytown, U.S.A. Muncie became another Peoria for market researchers and trade journals, who figured that if, say, newfangled school supplies sold here, they would sell . . . everywhere!
"The only two books that are absolutely necessary for an advertising man are the Bible and MIDDLETOWN!" one sales journal declared, according to Sarah E. Igo's book "The Averaged American."
There have been many more sociological studies and books about Muncie over the decades -- so many that Ball State formed the Center for Middletown Studies. A filmmaker came in and made a documentary series that aired on PBS in the late '70s and early '80s.
The good people of Muncie could be forgiven if they have felt at times like lab rats.
"It was terrible -- it made us look like a bunch of dumb oafs," says Phil Ball, eating breakfast at an IHOP and remembering the documentaries.
Ball, 89, is a retired doctor and amateur town historian whose family came to this area in the early 1800s. (They were the "original" Balls, he points out, not related to the wealthy Ball family that made its money in glass manufacturing here, and after whom the university was named. "Fruit jar Balls," he says with mock derision.)
Ball has written a book called "Dr. Coldwater's Hilarious History of Muncie" and he pens occasional columns for the local paper with headlines like "What's the Latest News From Muncie? Nothing!" He likes it here, he says, because there's just enough to do and because he can get anywhere in 10 minutes and most of all, because he knows it.
"It's a comfortable town," he says.
Not a lot happens here, which was always part of the beauty of Muncie. We talk of "heartland values" and "Main Street" and "Mr. and Mrs. John Q. Public." Muncie was all of that. Muncie didn't change. And now?
Muncie is still average, in a sense. If you consider uncertainty to be America's new norm.
* * *
The people of Muncie are not cynical when it comes to politicians, not exactly. But they are savvy.
They say we're not in a recession, says a retired press operator. You try telling the young people that.
They throw back shots and pretend to be like us, says a nursing instructor. I don't want a regular person in the White House. I want someone smarter than me.
They say, Jobs, jobs, jobs.
"I think it's a hollow slogan," says Jeff Lewis, who conducts political polls in Indiana, and who's sitting one evening at a retro-hip pub called Morton's, one of a few places that are trying to breathe life back into the old downtown.
"The glory days are gone," says his friend Joe Castelo, the former mayor of nearby Hartford City.
"Our students at Ball State . . . they don't stay around here," says Ray Scheele, a political science professor.
Once upon a time, "a guy who worked in the automotive industry here could have a boat, two cars, and his wife didn't work," Castelo says. "You were looked at like an idiot for going to college."
It will never be back the way it was, they all say. New jobs may come to Muncie, but it will never again be so easy to make a good living without a college diploma. And that's just the way it is. So when a candidate promises jobs, what sorts of jobs? And does the audience hear what it wants to hear because it wants things back the way they were?
The pollster, the politician and the professor are all Obama supporters. They think the Democratic vote will be close in Muncie, as it is across the nation, with the college students and the academics and the black community voting for Obama, and the white working class going for Clinton.
Speaking of Clinton.
"She opened up last week with, 'The issue in Indiana is jobs, jobs, jobs,' " Scheele says dryly. "And it played real well on the news."
* * *
When the Lynds landed in Muncie, they were nostalgic for what Muncie had been before industrialization. Now, industry is leaving Muncie and nostalgia has taken hold again.
Not among the young people, though. The young people are outta here. Everyone you talk to, their kids have left town for Indianapolis, New York, Washington.
"I would never stay here, ever, ever," says Destiny Wilcox, 23, of Evansville. It's Saturday and she's in her cap and gown, having just graduated with a degree in advertising from Ball State. Why would she stay in Muncie? she says. What would she do? Retail? Food service? Work at the university? "There are no jobs here."
At Clinton headquarters, DiAnne Hannah, 63, says she's voting for Clinton because Clinton "knows what reality really is," is steeped in the issues and can fix the problems with jobs and health care. Hannah says she left her job as a financial aid adviser at the university last year because she'd reached retirement age and she felt like if she stayed, she'd be taking the job away from someone younger, someone who really needed it.
"What chance do our young people have to stay here?" she says.
"What about someone like me?" says the woman across from her, Marti McKeighen, who's been making get-out-the-vote calls. Twenty-four years making auto parts on an assembly line at BorgWarner and now BorgWarner is leaving town. "I can't get my retirement and I'm 55 years old -- what's going to happen to me?"
Hannah and McKeighen start to reminisce about downtown Muncie and the way it was, back before the big-box stores and the strip malls. Grant's, JCPenney, the dime store, the soda fountain.
"This is old Muncie talking here," Hannah says.
"I remember when they had the Cinderella shop downtown," McKeighen says.
"Oh, yes," Hannah says.
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