French Lick IN: North to Indianapolis

Indianopolis deserved more time than we gave it on August 9, 2021.  
 

It was three hours drive from French Lick to Indianapolis, and on the way we stopped at Bloomington, where my dad got his Ph.D at Indiana University.  His major professor was a national expert on family-owned businesses, which was my father's special interest.  After two years at Indiana University, Dad spent a year taking post-graduate classes at Harvard, so I lived in Boston, as well as Bloomington, when I was little.  I think this photo was taken of Dad and Kent at Bloomington.

Dave and I drove about the campus, concentrating on the older, limestone buildings which would have formed the core of the university when my parents were there.  

We Googled “Hoosier Court”, which was the name of the student housing where Mom and Dad lived with Kent and me.  The GPS took us to an apartment building named “Hoosier Court” which may or may not have had anything to do with that early student housing from 70 years before.

We arrived in Indianapolis in the early afternoon, where we were impressed with the elaborate war memorial in the center of the city, with streets radiating out from it.  We bought ice cream cones and walked about the memorial and other buildings surrounding it.  

With the combination of a Covid resurgence and museums typically closing on Mondays, not much was open in Indianapolis when we visited.  We did spent a couple of hours at the magnificent Eiteljorg Museum, featuring Native and Western art.  It was a gem, with lavish displays of Western art by such painters as Georgia O’Keefe, Maynard Dixon, and Frederick Remington.  I hadn’t expected to travel from the West to the Midwest to see Western art, but this was an exquisite collection.

These were a few of my favorite pieces:

This painting was by Robert Henri, the New York City teacher of Minerva Teichert, who painted murals for the Manti Temple.

On our way back to French Lick, we stopped in Columbus, Indiana, the headquarters of Cummins, a Fortune 500 manufacturer of engines.  The founder of Cummins invested in first-rate architecture for buildings around the city.  The Chamber of Commerce gives walking tours of those elegant buildings, and I wish we had timed our trip to include one of them.  Next time.

As we visited Columbus, we thought of our grandson, Spencer Flindt, and his wife, Naomi, who, before they had their daughter, Ellie, spent a summer in Columbus, Indiana.  Spencer interned at Cummins and Naomi interned at Dow Chemical.