Inside Crooked Creek Elementary School’s cafeteria, Glenda Ritz wielded a scalpel, in-structing about 100 fourth-graders in the art of dissecting a spiny dogfish shark. The smell of the dead specimens, spread out on metal trays on top of blue table covers, filled the air. It was a lesson she had delivered—and a procedure she’d performed—more than a dozen times throughout her 33-year teaching career.
Co-author Bettie Cadou was a longtime reporter for The Indianapolis News and taught journalism at Butler University and IUPUI. After her death in 2002, she was inducted into the Indiana Journalism Hall of Fame. Brian D. Smith is a former IM senior editor.
One of my most vivid teen memories involves a Monday-morning pep rally in the Broad Ripple High School gym, after Coach Gene Ring’s Rockets won the sectionals, then regionals, and secured a trip to the 1963 semi-state. As the rock-star players filed onto the floor wearing varsity sweaters, the students in the bleachers went wild. Dressed in our own uniforms of stitched-down pleated skirts and cardigans, my girlfriends and I jumped up and down ’til our eyeballs rattled, screeching like banshees. The rumble was deafening, the kind you can feel way down in your gut.
Something just wasn’t right, and Connie Ballard knew it. Three weeks earlier, one of her best patrons, a kind, elderly man named Milt Lindgren, had come into her automotive-repair shop to tell her that he was planning a roadtrip, and that he wanted the oil changed in his van before he left. But he never returned to have the work done.
The night of the Richmond Hill explosion, my husband and I were sitting on our couch, 10 miles north of the southside neighborhood. It was just after 11 p.m. when we felt the house shudder. “What was that?” I asked, and we guessed that the dog had knocked into something upstairs; I even got up to check on him.
