It’s been fifteen years since Dad died

Ted Shideler 6 Comments
Read time: 8 min.

My dad died fifteen years ago today. I’d been batting around writing something formal to mark the occasion, but trying to compress his life into something tidy would require several volumes, a legal team, and a slew of affidavits to verify the most unbelievable parts. Dad was a story, or a series of them; layered, contradictory, and enormous. I’m not the raconteur that he was, but I’ll give it a shot with one of my favorite memories.

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Anderson’s downtown Big Boy

Ted Shideler 6 Comments
Read time: 4 min.

Ever stopped in at Frisch’s Big Boy for a Brawny Lad or a nice Swiss Miss? I sure have, at the Anderson, Indiana, location on Broadway Street. Believe it or not, though, Anderson once had three Frisch’s restaurants. One of them even sat right downtown, just across from the Madison County Courthouse. It must have been fun to smash a big burger in the heart of the city. 

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HUBRIS

Ted Shideler 12 Comments
Read time: 3 min.

A few years ago, people in a distant boardroom studied a map of Randolph County and decided that tiny Losantville, Indiana, was the perfect place to unveil one of retail’s newest concepts- a co-branded Family Dollar and Dollar Tree. It wasn’t one dollar store. It was two. Together. Next to an established Dollar General. In a town with two-hundred people. What were they thinking?

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Spotted in the wild: the first “Victorian” Village Pantry

Ted Shideler 2 Comments
Read time: 2 min.

As it grew across Indiana and Ohio, Yorktown-based Marsh Supermarkets wasn’t content to just dominate the grocery aisle- it wanted a foothold on the corner. In 1966, the company jumped headfirst into the booming convenience-store business with its Village Pantry division. Many of the oldest examples have found second lives as something else, and I can’t pass one without slowing down. 

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Indiana’s Wells County Home

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Read time: 5 min.

I’m still pretty early in my quest to visit every surviving county home in Indiana, but one of the first I tracked down was in Wells County. About three miles southeast of Bluffton along South County Home Road, the shuttered Wells County Infirmary and Orphan’s Asylum still marks the spot where people once cared for their most vulnerable residents.

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The shell of the old Pendleton High School Gym is hiding in plain sight

Ted Shideler 3 Comments
Read time: 4 min.

Some buildings don’t really disappear. Instead, they just learn how to hold new secrets. Pendleton’s elementary school campus is one of those places. At a glance, it’s a tidy, familiar part of town, reshaped over decades to meet modern needs. If you look a little closer, though, the outline of something older begins to emerge: the roof of the old Pendleton High School gym.

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The Petroleum Panthers

Ted Shideler 6 Comments
Read time: 4 min.

Back when I was in school at IPFW, I took every which way from my parents’ house in Muncie to my crappy apartment in Fort Wayne. I often passed through Petroleum on State Road 1. Once day, I wondered where the east-west crossroads went and passed a boulder marking the site of the old Petroleum school. I was in the area not long ago and went by a second time. 

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