DocAndersen
I am back to share some of my father’s old slides. These are from our first years in Indiana. Based on the cars you can quickly tell this is mid-1960’s. My father received a grant from the national science foundation in around 1965 (plus or minus). He left Niles West High School in Chicago Illinois (he was a biology teacher there) to pursue his Doctorate at Indiana University in Science Education. We arrived in Bloomington from Chicago, and frankly, it was a culture shock at first for me. I was used to going to the museums in Chicago. The Shedd Aquarium, the Field Museum of National History and my personal favorite to this day the Museum of Science and Industry. I love going to the museums in Chicago as a little kid. I also remember going to the Marshall Fields store in downtown Chicago with my mother.
Blooming didn’t have any of those, in fact growing up in southern Indiana was different. First, because as you can see from the pictures, there were lots of places that remained open. Bloomington is such a big little city now. When we moved to Bloomington there were between 34,000 and 35000 people in the city. According to the estimated 2016 population, the town has more than 85000 people now. We lived in a small university town, that became a big little city. Big, in the sense that it is one of the largest cities in Southern Indiana until you get to the Ohio River. Then there are cities such as Evansville that are bigger than Bloomington. Corydon on the Ohio River was the first capital of Indiana. Evansville is the 3rd, or possibly the 2nd largest city in the state. Fort Wayne is the other in that initial list.
I love looking at the old cars. We had an old sedan that didn’t have heat in the back seat. We didn’t have tablets. When my parents bought the new station wagon in 1969, my dad insisted on seat belts even in the third-row seat. That was a car that had two sets of front facing seats, and pop up way back seat that faced backward. My earliest memory of Bloomington Indiana is the Hoosier Courts nursery. I remember being in a room there and looking out over what was Hoosier Courts. I also have a memory of a birthday cake inside of our Apartment at Hoosier Courts. I remember stairs, and candles but not much more. We moved from the old US Army buildings (Hoosier courts) to the shiny new Apartments known as Tulip Trace a year or so after being in Bloomington. I do remember more of Tulip trace and our apartment there. But that is for another time!
