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Published: October 08, 2008 08:24 pm
Memories of Toad Hop, Indiana
By James J. McManus
Special to the Tribune-Star
Thomas Wolfe, said it and wrote it: “You can’t go home again.” He meant that this most special place in our lives is not waiting, frozen in time. In all its forms, “home” changes and we change. We cannot go there again, because it is gone and we are gone, except in fading memories.
So it is with Toad Hop, Indiana.
Because I lived a ways down a gravel road in farm country, on the western ridge of the prehistoric Wabash River Valley, I never was truly a citizen of lowland Toad Hop, but I knew every soul in town. I was the paper boy, who bicycled the Terre Haute Tribune seven days a week and collected 35-cents every Saturday from my customers — when they had the money. Sometimes, they did not.
There were long, empty stretches on my rural route, perhaps a half-mile between mailboxes, but Toad Hop was a welcome cluster for tired legs. And there was the Toad Hop grocery, where I could get a Royal Crown Cola for a nickel.
I would sit outside and watch the traffic on U.S. Highway 40, the famed “Lincoln Road,” two lanes of concrete that was America’s lifeline, coast-to-coast, from sea to shining sea.
Sen. Harry Truman, it was said, drove right through Toad Hop every summer on his way to Independence, Mo., and I used to fantasize that someday he would stop and get a Royal Crown for himself and we would sit on the outdoor bread box and talk about politics and history.
Many, many years later, as a news reporter, I got to speak briefly with President Truman, then retired in his 80s. I forgot to mention Toad Hop.
Toad Hop’s few hundred folks lived only scant feet up the slope from Big Sugar Creek, a clear, cold stream that held the town in the crook of a curving arm and then ran pretty straight through corn and bean fields and aimed for the Wabash River a few miles downstream.
Without fail, spring rains draining uplands from the Illinois line to the west would turn Big Sugar into a tumbling, gritty brown. In the wettest years, the water would churn toward the homes and threaten to drown the Lincoln Road traffic. Was such a thing possible?
That was in the late 1940s, now history. Most recently, the Terre Haute Tribune-Star reports that Toad Hop may be a goner. The enormous Midwestern flooding of 2008 has almost swallowed it whole. One can only hope that the hard lessons of Hurricane Katrina’s attack on New Orleans and the Gulf Coast will save the village, because FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, promises a rescue.
Ironically, perhaps apocryphally, it was a monster flood in days of yore that chased thousands of what we in Indiana call “hop toads” from the Wabash bottomlands and into the town — or so the story goes. Unfazed, the citizens kept their calm and allowed the event, over time, to emblazon their history and name their unincorporated hometown.
As the years passed, floods became more aggressive. Some Toad Hoppers, still calm and resolute, raised their houses on stilts and then on more permanent individual levees six to eight feet high. If the waters crossed U.S. 40, I would coast my bike down the ridge from Larimer Hill and drop a packet of newspapers at the high water mark. They would be gone the next day.
Late word has it that only four families have been able to return to the terribly damaged town. Others have speculated it is time to abandon hope and let Big Sugar Creek win the struggle. Still others, clinging to the last shred of belief, are signing up for help and trying hard, in spite of history and Tom Wolfe’s dictum, to go home again.
I hope they succeed.
But, now in my 70s, I doubt that I shall go there again.
How could a visit today, so many decades later, replace the memory of the former semi-pro pitcher, who showed us baseball-crazy kids how to save our young elbows by whipping a sidearm slider that broke away from lefthanders and handcuffed guys, who hit from the right?
And how that old fella in Terre Haute, who watched us toss that wicked Toad Hop pitch in summer baseball for the Veterans of Foreign Wars, turned out to be the long-retired Mordecai “Three Finger” Brown, one of the major leagues’ greatest pitchers and a Hall of Famer?
The Toad Hop I remember was a busy place of folks who lived paycheck to paycheck when they could get a paycheck. And too many others, who so rarely had a dime, would share with neighbors the reading of my Terre Haute Tribune.
One week I would deliver the paper first to the Smiths and next week first to the Joneses. Then I would try to collect my 35 cents from one or the other and sometimes each would argue to a draw that it was the other guy who owed the money.
After graduation from Concannon High School, when I joined the U.S. Navy, I quit my $2.50 a week paper route and left more than eight dollars uncollected in Toad Hop. But I never felt bad about it; never felt a loss. It was my gift, easily given to friends.
And so, once again, here’s to Toad Hop on the way back come hell or high water.
About the author
James McManus is a retired CBS News correspondent, a graduate of the (former) Concannon High School and Indiana University, a former newsman for the (old) WBOW, a two-week vacation replacement reporter for the (old) Terre Haute Star, and a paper boy for the (old) Terre Haute Tribune, riding a county bicycle route in 1947, including the village of Toad Hop.
The Tribune-Star’s online coverage of the recent flooding inspired McManus to write a 900-word piece about Toad Hop.
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