User:Cuppysfriend

I live in Will Cuppy's hometown, Auburn, Indiana, and have made a hobby of researching his life and family history. My humble contributions to Wikipedia are based on the principle that one thing leads to another. Besides starting the article on Cuppy, I expanded the one on Auburn. I contributed an article on Cedar Creek, which flows through Auburn, and one on the Eel River, which centuries ago formed a single stream with Cedar Creek and where Cuppy played as a boy when he visited his grandmother's farm near South Whitley.

Writing about Cuppy naturally led to an article about 15017 Cuppy, the asteroid named for him. That, in turn, led to my adding many names to the list of asteroids named after people. One of those, 1761 Edmondson, was named after Frank K. Edmondson, who taught my astronomy class at Indiana University. So I wrote an article about him, but not before I contributed a few extra facts to the article on his hero Daniel Kirkwood and wrote one about asteroid 1578 Kirkwood, which Edmondson rediscovered after it was "lost" during World War II. I also wrote an article about Edmondson's Indiana Asteroid Program, which discovered or rediscovered 119 asteroids in the days before computerized sky-scans took over the job of finding near-Earth objects that might whack us into extinction. Sometime during the Cretaceous, something big really did whack Indiana just east of a bullseye marked by the intersection of U.S. Highways 24 and 41 in Newton County, creating the Kentland crater. My effort to expand the crater article collided with a simultaneous edit by Wetman. We worked it out.

Getting back to Auburn, I wrote an article on the extinct Auburn Automobile Company and on the company's best-known designer, Gordon Miller Buehrig, whose cousin Edward Buehrig was my polisci prof at Indiana University. Extinction is also the theme of my article on Pipe Creek Sinkhole, a paleontological dig in Grant County, Indiana supervised by my friend Jim Farlow of Indiana University-Purdue University at Fort Wayne. If I hadn't known about Pipe Creek, then I wouldn't have started the article about the Gray Fossil Site in Tennessee.

But I was talking about Auburn, wasn't I? James Indus Farley, a New Deal-era congressman who knew my father lived here, so I figured that if I didn't write something about him no one would. Ralph Austin Bard didn't live here, but he knew Farley when both were associated with the Auburn Automobile Company. Bard became Under Secretary of the Navy during World War II and sent a famous memorandum to Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson saying that we shouldn't drop the atomic bomb on Japan without fair warning. Bard was a quiet, self-effacing man, which made his dissent from the collective judgment of the Interim Committee that the bomb should be used without warning speak all the louder.

Auburn is where the dominoes began to fall that led to the United States Supreme Court's decision in Stump v. Sparkman, a troubling case that warns us that the people sitting next to us in church might differ from the "good Germans" of the 1930s only by the accidents of history and geography.

Then there are my articles on the Bancroft Treaties, Mauritanian diplomat Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, and the abolitionist Calvin Fairbank. How do I connect to them? Well, I tripped across the Bancroft Treaties in the 1970s when I worked at the U.S. Department of State. Prodding the right people to get rid of them before they caused real mischief might be my only contribution to international law. State was also where I met Ould-Abdallah, a dynamic ambassador who could likely have been president of the Rotary Club in any American city you might care to name and who would, in my opinion, make a pretty fair United Nations Secretary-General.

I tripped over the Rev. Fairbank while looking for information on Will Cuppy's mother's third husband's younger brother, Rev. Aaron Lilly. There's no connection whatever between them except that someone with the same name is buried in the same cemetery as Fairbank. If there were any real logic to things, I should have found Fairbank when I was researching my great-grandmother's second husband's older brother who married the daughter of a reputed Underground Railroad activist.

On my "to do" list, I'd like to expand the article (someone beat me to writing the stub) on Indiana novelist Ross Lockridge Jr., author of Raintree County, who, like Will Cuppy, was a child of the Eel River. He's also buried in the same cemetery as Daniel Kirkwood.

Rollie Zeider, a professional baseball player who held the rookie record for stolen bases longer than most people live, grew up in Auburn and is buried here; but he was born in a little crossroads town near Logansport named Hoover, which just happens to be located on...you guessed it...the Eel River! I didn't start the article about him, but I contributed a few biographical facts that were easy for me to dig out from local records. After he retired from baseball, Rollie (or "Polly" as he was known around here) opened a tavern in Garrett, a nearby town with which Auburn had a longstanding high school sports rivalry. That might account for a certain coolness in Auburn toward someone who probably should be celebrated as our local link to baseball's golden age. My father liked to go to "Polly Zeider's."

I did, however, start the article on Don Lash, the track and field star who won the 1938 James E. Sullivan Award as America's top amateur athlete. Lash was born in Bluffton, but grew up in Auburn, where legend has it that his high school coach kept him out of football so that he wouldn't injure himself. Good thing, too. Lash was a phenomenon of long-distance running. Although he failed to win a single medal at the 1936 Olympics, those were virtually the only races he ever lost. I met him when I was in high school. He was friendly, calm and self-possessed, having nothing of the chest-thumping egotism that tarnishes so much of today's sports scene. He was a gentleman of the old school.

I've been pretty busy lately and haven't done much more than scan my watchlist for vandalism, but I was happy to discover an image on the Commons of the Collège de Ste-Anne de La Pocatière and add it to the article on La Pocatière, Quebec. "La Poc" is where I did my French-language training in 1970 in preparation for a Peace Corps assignment in Ivory Coast. No, La Poc is not located on the Eel River. The local stream there is called the St. Lawrence.

* * *

The Eel is arguably more Hoosier than the Wabash, which we have to share with Ohio and Illinois. Just within pitching distance of Rollie Zeider's birthplace in Cass County is the site of the old Miami town of Kenapacomaqua, or "Eel River Town," that a U.S. force under James Wilkinson raided in 1791. Wilkinson, who later gained notoriety in the Aaron Burr conspiracy trial, seems almost apologetic that two women and a child were killed "in the hurry and confusion of the charge." The raid was a nasty piece of business, an attack on a largely undefended settlement mainly for the purpose of taking hostages. Today we call such actions "terrorism."

The raid on Kenapacomaqua was a relatively mild affair compared to the treatment meted out in 1838 to Indiana's last band of Potawatomis. Although nobody seems to have set out with the deliberate intent to kill them, about 40 of them died on a forced march from Marshall County to Kansas, a sad trek that has since been named the "Trail of Death." Guilty white liberal that I am, I consider my editorial contributions to the articles about Kenapacomaqua and the Trail of Death as a small penance for the sins of my heavily-armed forebears, who treated the Native American population of my state about the same way that today's developers treat the raccoons and woodchucks whose homes and lives they despoil in the name of progress.

But there are some real heroes in Hoosier history whose stories need to be told. One of them, Edward Ralph May, who represented my county at the Constitutional Convention of 1850, was the only (I repeat: the only) delegate who voted to allow African Americans the right to vote in Indiana elections. May's speech on African American suffrage is an oratorical masterpiece, but he didn't make very many more. Possibly looking for a more progressive place where he could build a career, he moved to Minnesota, where he and his wife died of cholera. Someone else who died of cholera was Richard Dillingham, a sensitive young schoolteacher from Ohio who tried to free some slaves in Tennessee and ended up in prison and then dead for for his efforts.

Another courageous young idealist was my college classmate Alex Shimkin, who died in a grenade attack in Vietnam in 1972 while covering the war for Newsweek. Working beside him in a polisci lab, I didn't know that he had been jailed in Alabama and Mississippi for civil rights work. In Vietnam, he uncovered the ghastly indiscriminate killing of noncombatants that went on in "Operation Speedy Express" while we were puttering around in our lab. War brought him to the threshold of potential greatness, then cut him off.

One of the values I want to serve on Wikipedia is that of justice. Although I always strive to observe Wikipedia's rule of writing from a neutral point of view, a number of the subjects I've chosen to write about have to do with people who took a risk to do right and received little credit for it. It isn't necessary to embellish their stories or vilify their opponents. The truth is their memorial.