Testing the Water as a podcaster?

A year ago I considered diving into the world of podcasts with a folksy-Hoosier travel sort of theme. I have about a dozen stories written and thought I'd test the water with content dropped onto my blog...something I haven't been back to in more than two years. I plan to drop these stories maybe twice a month on Sundays. What follows is the opener.

I don’t think one sets out to start a podcast, much like one doesn’t typically set out to write a book. It seems like the book finds them, or in this case, the podcast. I used to blog, a lot, and had a whopping dozen or so followers. I used that more as therapy than anything, but it pulled together my love of Indiana, history, and our natural landscape into folksy tales. Hoosier Happenings, the name of the blog, peaked as my business began to take off and time no longer permitted writing. The blog sprinkled in politics and faith, the therapeutic part, but since both have drawn such hard lines in the sand these days, I’ll probably pass on including much of that here.

I grew up just outside a town of about 500 people in Northern Indiana. I was within eyeshot of my grandparents’ farm, our business-a truck stop, and my uncle’s house. I packed my wagon one time and ran away to my grandparents. Maybe twice. I was the middle child and prone to do that. Our life was really the truck stop. My grandparents built it, but five generations were part of it. After World War II, they traded their small farm for a restaurant at the corner of old 31 and 6, then in 1956, they rebuilt it down the road when old 31 became a four-lane. Ultimately, competition by chains and rerouting of traffic caused my folks to close the business. I mention this backdrop to my life because I think it played a role in the formation of my longing for the road and mom and pop shops that represent life in Indiana, well, the best of life in Indiana.

School was also small town. That small town of 500 specifically. It was the oldest building I experienced on a regular basis, built as a consolidated township school in the 1920s. There was an older part, from the late 1800s, that had a creepy basement and tower that were fodder for some outlandish stories I would create. One I told in First Grade, to my little friends who didn’t know better, was that I was kidnapped and raised by Native Americans and that I still carried a scar they gave me to identify me as one of the tribe. Conveniently, I was able to point to a birthmark on my side during recess to prove it. This was the start of my story telling. Then my sister was caught with cigarettes and my folks decided that we were to be protected from the world and sent to a small Christian school, from which I graduated. But if anything was not small town, it was our regular Sunday routine. Our family, among many others, left that small town’s church and began attending a, well, mega-church for its time, in South Bend. The church was Charismatic. This is the background that shaped my faith, which will, without intention, come through in this chronology.

One other piece to the puzzle of my past is that love for Indiana born out of seeing a model of one of the best Hoosiers that has ever graced this state. My mom’s dad died while I was young. I wish I had known him much longer because not only do I look a great deal like him, we shared similar interests and seem to share a quiet demeanor and personality. However, my grandma remarried former Indiana Governor Otis Bowen, who had been our family physician in another small town-Bremen. Of the grand, grand old party, I saw what public service, modeled by a true servant, truly looked like. He’s been called Indiana’s favorite son. While many today do not know him, I can tell you he was that. He loved Indiana and it loved him back. He may have been a Republican, but his blood ran Hoosier which is not true of our politicians today. Statesman is no longer in our vocabulary. This backdrop of statesmanship influenced me maybe more powerfully than anything else for my life ahead.

My first love was architecture. I remember sketching building plans while I stayed with my grandpa after grandma died when I was 13 years old. I still have that sketchbook. But business and finance also interested me, so I landed on that after high school. But as my time in college grew to a close, and life’s plans changed with a break-up, I went on to architecture school and all the gears began to work in my head. History, mostly related to my family roots, was still important to me as was the idea of landing in Indiana after college. So, a few months before I walked to get my diploma, I scanned architectural firms in Indiana and picked out a dozen from Evansville to Elkhart that seemed to fit my interests. However, I had also met the principal of a firm located in my hometown through a charter leadership class we were both in. And he was hiring. And so fulfilled the dream of returning to my small town Indiana hometown.

I met my wife in a coffee shop downtown. We bought a house on main street, and brought two little ones home from the hospital to this slice of Americana. While yet in high school, I got engaged in politics which morphed and continued into elected office, both on city council and as a county commissioner. I also worked with others in starting non-profits, some history and some travel-related, over the course of the following years.

I drove our architecture firm’s historic preservation focus, and becoming self-taught in the ways of understanding, well, how to “see” history and the standing reminders left by those who came before us. And I began to see my life’s work as a way to honor those, and carry our history forward as a steward of Indiana’s legacy. And it should be no surprise, then, when I went out on my own, that approach became my focus. To-date, besides traveling endlessly across the state, I’ve worked in more than three-quarters of her counties and have gotten to know the very best Hoosiers.

I enjoy kayaking and am trying to tackle all of Indiana’s most prominent rivers. Sugar Creek is foremost for me, but I’ve also spent time on the Flatrock, Eel, Yellow, Wildcat, Tippecanoe, Whitewater, and Kankakee. I enjoy hiking through the woods, while my wife enjoys the beach. I’ve often said to folks, you can keep the beach, drive me out to some remote forest and dump me out and I will have found heaven. Backpacking stints on the Appalachian Trail and North Woods Trail also informed me I have my limits. I dabble in photography and often have to disconnect my “documentation” mode in order to capture the “artsy” shots, as my friends say. Much of my subject matter comes from everything mentioned above, as well as that love for country roads. One day I hope to have a gallery to display these photos-in conjunction with an office slightly larger than the closet I am in now.

Today, after a decade and a half in business, after buying a farmstead in the country we call Sycamore Hill, and restoring the same, after the kids have grown up and now attend colleges-both in-state, after switching to a more traditional church befitting my own faith journey, and after another stint in public office that made me realize there’s very little redeeming hope for that desire any longer, after all that…I’m looking for another challenge.

I wrote a piece once about an existential moment I had while visiting a historic site, then posted it on my blog. That’s when I realized that there was something bigger and deeper going on here than just me taking a check for services. I realized that Indiana was presenting her stories to me, if I just listened, and that my love for the state allowed me to interpret them for others. That was almost 10 years ago.

With an increasing portfolio of these stories, and my Facebook posts about them, people have suggested I write a book. That may follow. I suppose the book would write itself, but I feel as though the stories will be ongoing, they aren’t finite to the extent that I can type THE END to anything just yet. So this venue seems the best, at least for now.

You’ll see a common theme in the stories. Traveling backroads, my experiences with historic sites, our state’s rivers, some of my family connections to sites, the small towns, all of these will be woven together to, hopefully, make you feel like you’re on the journey too.

I share my background as the backdrop to how the stories are told. To give context to the stories. To hopefully help you see what I see when I travel Indiana so that you feel like you’re there with me. This is no small challenge, because if we don’t travel and feel these places together, we will have missed the point altogether.