40 Years in Beer, Part Six: The K & H Forever (Lanesville Prelude)

Lanesville Heritage Weekend parade, 1985. Author’s photo. Previously: 40 Years in Beer, Part 5: Those Scoreboard Daze of Old (Second Movement) Kicking off the sixth and seventh parts of my “40 Years in Beer” series, here’s a brief digression about living in Indiana my whole damn life. Even as teeny tiny babies, Hoosiers grasp that in Indiana, all roads lead to Indianapolis. This useful information probably never occurs to people living in or near the capital city. For the rest of us, it’s a lesson we’re seldom allowed to forget. Indianapolis regards itself not only as the crossroads of Indiana, but of America itself. Our state governmental bureaucracy behaves accordingly, and the sole point of reference uniting far-flunk outposts like Ft. Wayne, Evansville, the Chicagoland suburbs and my home base of New Albany is a shared recognition that Indianapolis will always suck all the air from any available rooms. Partly because of this centralizing tendency, Southern Indiana – where I’ve spent the past 62 years – often finds itself rendered into an abstraction, as much a mental construct as quantifiable geography. The Ohio River defines the entirety of Indiana’s southern border with Bourbonland (formerly known as “Kentucky”), and in antebellum times the river was a...Read more