Infamous Indiana

I wrote versions of most of these to post on IndyStar.com, along with photo galleries (which were preferred by managers because they boosted pageview counts).

Later, for my own site, I made this project using a facing-page approach in which the left page scrolls with the narrative (without moving the overall page) and the links from the narrative open on the right-hand page. I was also, of course, going for a retro approach visually.

This sort of thing had already become an avenue of website design that we all had to forego because, for one thing, iframes were bad for SEO, and also we needed to start designing for mobile devices, which were too small to view this kind of display.

Factfile Histories

The encyclopedia project I started at The Star in 2000 included several historical topics such as: The most deadly Indiana tornadoes, the Eli Lilly Company, the sinking of the U.S.S. Indianapolis, and the murder of the Carol Jenkins that remained unsolved until a child witness remembered what she saw in adulthood.

Various History Articles

Over the years, I wrote lots of history articles, but I did not think to save them all. Here are those that I kept or managed to find later, on a variety of topics. Some are disasters, some historic buildings like the Pembroke Arcade and some are notable Hoosiers like Madelyn Pugh who was a comedy writer for the I love Lucy show. Also, there are some more true crime tales like the Lasalle Street murders and the disappearance of Shannon Sherrill.

The StarFiles Blog

Although I wrote lots of history items over the years, there was brief period of time when I had a local history blog. I only had it for a few months, but it became popular, and several posts got lots of comments. I was even interviewed on one of the local radio stations about it.

Unfortunately, this opportunity only lasted a little while, and then the entire IndyStar.com site went through a corporate redesign that made it impossible for rogue players like me to insert our own HTML code to enhance display. Not that I blame them. It was just a logical thing for them to do in order to make a large website uniform, but it took a lot of the value out of it for me, and I gave up the blog and just produced occasional history items as regular IndyStar articles and photo galleries.

Centennial history book

The first book project I managed was in 2003, which was the centennial year of The Indianapolis Star. Most of the book was to be historic photos, which we in the library selected from our files. We decided we needed a chapter of narrative for each decade, and I worked with reporter Rob Schneider to produce them.

Although Rob and I are listed as co-authors on the title page, I did not credit the individual chapter entries, and I no longer recall which chapters I wrote (though I recognize myself in some, such as the 1920s). I am therefore including them all here.

Indy 500 History

The year 2011 was the 100th anniversary of the first Indianapolis 500 Mile Race, and so The Indianapolis Star decided to publish a commemorative book.

I was chosen to manage the project because I had done three previous books for the paper. The first had been the Star centennial book, but then, in 2007, I managed a sports championship book when the Indianapolis Colts went to the Super Bowl for the first time.

For the Indy 500 book, we needed a summary of each year of the race. I was working with two of the auto racing sportswriters, and we decided to divide it into three batches. I took the earliest years, 1911-1941. Here are those pages.

After the book was completed, I used the same content to make an online version, but I wasn't able to preserve it because it used a third-party database program. I did save part of it, though.