I forgot to say that last night (Day 3), after we arrived in Muncie late in the evening, we went downtown to "the" gay bar in Muncie. It was still the same, more than 25 years later, and that was it for the gay "nightlife" in Muncie. Sorry, it wasn't worth a photo.
We got up this morning and after visiting most of the day with Mickey's cousins (yesterday's blog and photos), we headed into Indiannapolis. Today's blog is really about Saturday afternoon, evening, and Sunday morning before we leave for Ohio and George and Steve's place.
This is the "Soldiers and Sailors" Monument in the core of downtown Indiannapolis. It is ENORMOUS!
We sat the camera on the edge of the fountain and set it on timer. Not a bad shot for a "timer" shot, especially since the sun was already going down and it was dusk.
After seeing downtown we found the gay nightlife and stopped at a couple of the nightclubs. The one I really liked was Talbots, an old theater with a balcony, but it didn't hold our attention very long. Nobody was dancing. OP's (now Greg's Our Place) was more like Georgie's Alibi, but once again, no dancing. Metro was kind of nice, and it had a little gift shop where we got some rainbow stickers for my back bumper. I guess we were kind of early, but even still, it was really kind of late by the time we got to White Castle's for their famous little burgers. It was still a 70 minute drive back to our hotel in Muncie.
We got up Sunday morning, packed our stuff and then did the following city tour of Muncie on our way out of town:The Shaffer Chapel A.M.E. Church (African Methodist Episcopal) deserves special mention here. It is also in the Whitely neighborhood of Muncie, within walking distance of Mickey's family home. His mother was raised a member of this church. It was built in 1893 as a four-room school and was purchased by the congregation of the AME Church in 1928 while J.E. Johnson was reverend. Reverend Johnson was also a licensed mortician. On August 7th, 1930 two young Negro boys were lynched in neighboring Marion County (40 miles north.) The lynching started when a mob of 1,000 people stormed the Grant County jail, removed the boys, dragged them behind automobiles through the streets of Marion, and hung them from a maple tree on the courthouse grounds in Marion. Reverend Johnson felt that the boys deserved a Christian burial, so he drove his hearse to Marion where there were no Negro morticians. (Go figure - it was where the KKK Grand Wizard was located at the time.) In spite of the enormous personal risk, he was successful in obtaining the bodies and he brought them back to his mortuary in Muncie for embalming. Rumors started circulating that a white mob had formed in downtown Muncie, with plans to storm the mortuary, remove the bodies, and drag them through the streets of Muncie. The Negro Community responded to the rumors by organizing and arming themselves and using Shaffer Chapel A.M.E. Church as a command post, turning back the threat. Reverend Johnson returned the bodies to Marion the next day with protection from Delaware County (Muncie) Sheriff Fred Puckett and the Indiana State Police. One eyewitness to the event said, "I never will forget Orville "Trooper" Taylor. He was our leader. He was spacing us up and down Highland Avenue, and anybody who came by in a car, especially white folks, would be stopped and questioned. We thought sure somebody was going to get killed that night but nobody came to get the bodies."
Mickey's parents were 14 years old at this time, and they were raised in the Whitely community surrounding this chapel and his mother was attending this church every Sunday! She would tell Mickey stories of how every two-story building had men with rifles stationed on the roofs. It is more easily understood why she was so protective of Mickey when you place her own childhood against this backdrop.
Tuhey Park was also another reminder to me (Lester) of the world in which Mickey was raised. The opening of the Tuhey Park swimming pool was a much heralded event in Muncie, but de-facto segregation was the rule. By 1956 change was in the wind. A court challenge was made by the Black community where it was charged that a pool supported by all taxpayers could not be used soley by white families, and like Rosa Parks, one brave man took three Black kids to the pool. After about an hour, 20 other Black kids joined them, which prompted several skirmishes and verbal threats were uttered by the white kids and their parents. In the aftermath, every pool in the city was closed on June 12th, 1956 (on Mickey's 4th-month birthday.) A man named Buley had been successful in fully desegregating the Tuhey Pool and it re-opened on June 19th, but even years later the tension was still felt. Mickey's mother would never let Mickey or his brother swim there. The story Mickey remembers is that it was bought by private interests so that it could remain segregated, but it eventually reverted back to the city (I think because it came due for major renovations - since the current Tuhey Pool has a waterslide and splash park.) After the pool became "public" again all the "white kids" would no longer go there and Mickey remembers them swimming at the privately owned "Water Bowl" out in the suburbs. More details are written in the book,
"The Other Side of Middletown." Mickey is just going through the list of authors and contributors and knows many of them by name. Most of them are members of the Shafer Chapel A.M.E. Church and the chapel is mentioned prominently in the credits. The book was the brainchild of Hurley Goodall, a man who knew Mickey's mother very well. The book was published in 2003, but Mickey's mother passed away in 1997. Mickey is certain she would have been heavily involved in compiling that book if she would have been alive.
This is the McDonald's where Mickey worked for a couple of years. He started there while still in high school, shortly after he turned 16 in 1972. He was the first black and the only black to work at this McDonalds for almost 2 years.
This is Mickey in front of the "new" high school. He only attended this school for his senior year. Prior to this school he attended Central High School, which had been "condemned" by the city fathers, which is another way of saying "The Ball Brothers." You see, the Ball brothers wanted that downtown property for their new corporate head offices. The "condemned" school was so "frail" that they couldn't get the 2nd floor walls demolished, so they built a burm or something to get a bulldozer up on the 2nd floor to knock down the walls. Not too shabby that a condemned building would be so resistent to demolition. Right after building the corporate headquarters, the Ball Brothers sold off the factory and closed down all Muncie operations. Muncie is just a shell of the city that it once was.
Which leads us to Beneficence, the statue that honors the Ball Brothers in a central plaza at Ball State University. Mickey has some fond memories of his time at Ball State and his comming out process. He had his first "Gay Kiss" one evening hiding behind "Benny".
Almost as important as getting married on this trip was the visit to Barack and Michelle's house. We almost didn't get a chance to get this tour. The White House Tour tickets are highly prized and Robert Wexler's office didn't have any left, so I fired back an email and told them how much Mickey donated to the Obama campaign, and...I played the "race card." I told the girl that Mickey is African-American and how much this meant to him. On the day we left Florida we received notification that Wexler's staff had secured White House tour tickets from another congressman's office. Yeah! 
Our tour started early, so we headed out on the Metro and got an early start on our first full day together as a married couple!
After the tour, this is where you come out, and the first chance you get to have your camera or cell phone out in the open.
This is "the man." That smile on his face is genuine, pure happiness. Happy in the knowledge that his "investment" in Obama has paid off. A Black family now lives in the house that was built by slaves. If only his mothere and father could have lived to experience this moment!
Just outside of the White House, as you walk back into the city, you pass the Treasury Building.
This is the home where President Lincoln died, across the street from the Ford Theater.
We then went through a few of the Smithsonian museums. We spent most of the time in the Aeronautical Museum and Museum of Natural History. 
You know, it really kills me that these home-schooling Christian fundamentalist families take their kids to the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History that shows off all these dinosaurs and their kids all watch this cute video about evolution. It features a little "rat" who was the earliest mammal, and how every mammal evolved from that "rat," and then these parents have to take those home-schooled kids back home and "undo" all that science so their kids can still believe that the Earth is only 6,000 years old.
These fossils were my touchstone back to my youth. They are of the Albertosaurus and Edmontonsaurus, and were found in my home province of Alberta, Canada. As a Mormon boy, in the Mormon colonies of Alberta, with Mormon teachers, in a Mormon school district of a "public school system" that was dominated by elected Mormon representatives, evolution was very complicated. The provincial government mandated that "science" be taught, along with sex education, but parents could "sign their kids out" of the sex ed class (more than 70% still did this in 1999 when our kids attended there.) In school we were taught that the "rest" of the mammals might have evolved just like the Smithsonian video explains it, but man was "created" by God "from dust" and placed on this Earth. We didn't "evolve" here like the monkeys and orangutans did. The fact that we now know we share 99.8% of the DNA of a chimpanzee is just a coincidence. As a matter of fact, the Mormon doctrine, when it gets really complicated at a university level at BYU, tries to justify evolution by stating that the "fossils" are from another planet that got knocked out of orbit or something, killing everything off. When God needed a new world for his ever-expanding infinite population of Spirit Children, He grabbed this floating rock with the fossils already in it and placed it in orbit around this sun and started the necessary plants and animals growing until it was hospitable for Adam and Eve, and then He dropped them here so that they could start new bodies for all those Spirit Children waiting in line. The Mormon God just keeps doing this over-and-over again because every Mormon couple who get married in the temple and remain worthy of the "privilege" that is earned by strict obedience to the 4,300 "highest order" commandments, will be rewarded with a world just like this one for themselves. With a temple marriage, and earned privilege (grace has nothing to do with it), these "nouveau Gods" will be given a world all their own so that all their Spirit Children can have bodies too. Oh, by-the-way. You should know that these "spirit children" are created by the temple-married Mormon couples (who keep their bodies of flesh-and-blood just like Christ kept his) having actual intercourse sex for the eternities. It makes my head hurt to think about it, but you know what? BYU actually grants doctoral degrees to biologists, anthropologists, and zoologists who truly, in their heart, believe this crap! At BYU, if you profess to NOT believe this stuff, they excommunicate you from the church and try to kick you out. Very scary!
These are the whales and other mammals of the sea that were created on the fifth day, if I remember my Bible stories correctly. The food for them to eat had to be created on the fourth day, but in Sunday School we were told that a "day" in the Lord's time could have literally been thousands, or millions of years. God didn't have to be constrained by science. He could pretty much do whatever he wanted. If these explanations didn't answer all your questions you were told to put those questions on a "shelf" and wait until the "next life" and ask God yourself. That is a subject of my other blog called "A Gentle Nudge."
When you go to Dupont Circle the Subway is very deep in the ground. The escalators go on forever.
The Union Station in Washington DC is a very amazing building. The Metro station there is just a couple of doors off in the corner. Most of the activity there has to do with Amtrak trains.
These are some of the night shots that Mickey captured with his amazing camera that has image stabilization on it. You should recognize the Jefferson Memorial and the Washington monument, but you probably won't recognize the fountain in the plaza across from the front of the White House.
