Hoosier History Live

Even though 17 years have zipped by since their last visit, no one is putting out welcome mats for the periodical cicadas that are about to take Indiana by swarm. The Hoosier state is considered one of the country's major hot spots for the 17-year emergence of the type of cicadas known as Brood X.

"The bugs will show up pretty much anywhere there are mature trees, and the males will unleash loud mating calls that will fill the late spring with buzzing music," the Evansville Courier-Journal reported in a heads-up article about the insects that are typically considered pests, to say the least. According to the Courier-Journal, early pioneers of European heritage, alarmed by the swarms, incorrectly assumed that cicadas were like locusts and would ravage their crops, giving cicadas their "first jolt of bad publicity."

So who can separate fact from myth about these critters?

Hoosier History Live is summoning a top national insect expert who happens to be based in our own backyard.

Dr. Tom Turpin, the Purdue University professor emeritus of entomology who created the annual Bug Bowl competition (touted as "the world's largest insect-themed event") on the West Lafayette campus, will be Nelson's guest. For decades, he wrote On Six Legs, a popular column (and starting in 2008, podcast) for the Purdue Extension service.

Among the questions about cicadas that Dr. Turpin says he plans to tackle: Why do so many emerge at the same time? Will eating periodical cicadas kill my dog or cat, or make them sick? and How long will periodical cicadas be singing?

"Singing" isn't the word most people use to describe the loud, persistent noise made by the 17-year cicadas. According to a recent analysis in USA Today, experts standing a few feet away from swarms have measured their sounds at 96 decibels, "slightly higher than a low-flying airplane, which can hit about 80 decibels."

In any case, Dr. Turpin has a long track record of exploring insects that are regarded as annoying or even repulsive. Cockroach races and cricket-spitting contests have been frequent events at the Bug Bowl.

"People are conditioned not to like insects," Dr. Turpin said in 2017 upon his retirement from the Purdue faculty.

Also in 2017, he was a Hoosier History Live guest for a show titled Insect heritage: The As to Zzzzzs. He has shared insights about insects with ABC News' Good Morning America, Time magazine and other national media.

During our show, Dr. Turpin will describe what cicadas eat. For 17 years, Brood X has been living underground, usually attached to the roots of trees. (Another brood of periodical cicadas emerges in 13-year cycles.)

Their emergence is part of a mating process, as are their distinctive sounds. After mating with male cicadas, females lay their eggs on twigs and branches in trees.

That means areas thick with mature trees tend to be where swarms of cicadas emerge. In central Indiana, Eagle Creek Park, the Geist Reservoir area and Fort Harrison State Park are likely sites for heavy swarms. Elsewhere in the state, Shades State Park, McCormick's Creek State Park and the Hoosier National Forest are probable hot spots, according to a recent report in the Indianapolis Star.

Feeling a little creeped out at the thought of the cicadas' return?

Take solace in the fact that the periodical cicadas - which date back to the dinosaur era - will have a fleeting presence. After one month or six weeks at most, Brood X cicadas will no longer be above ground - at least not for another 17 years.

Never mind that he's done videos about historic sites in nine other states. Home turf for the creator of the multimedia project History in Your Own Backyard is Indiana.

With a motto that advises motorists to "travel slowly and stop often," Satolli Glassmeyer has ventured from his home in the small Indiana town of Sunman in Ripley County to make short documentary videos about historic locales across the state. His subjects range from so-called "phantom" bridges and towns so small they don't have a single stoplight to a former movie theater that now houses the city hall in Rushville and a YMCA built in Greensburg in 1915 that's been renovated into senior apartments.

And then there's Howe Military Academy, the prep boarding school that opened in the 1890s in LaGrange County and closed in 2019.

They are among the sites that Satolli will discuss when he joins Nelson to explore destinations featured on History in Your Own Backyard, a project that includes a YouTube channel, a newsletter and an extensive website.

He's particularly intrigued by phantom bridges, which, Satolli explains, are located on "ghost roads," i.e. county roads that have been closed or are no longer maintained. Many now are on private property.

During our show, Satolli will share insights about phantom bridges in Indiana that are particularly noteworthy, including the Triple Whipple Bridge near Aurora, nicknamed "the Queen Mary of all bridges." Built in 1878, the Triple Whipple spans a creek in Dearborn County and is the only bridge with its distinctive design that is still standing in the country.

With Satolli as our guide, we also will explore the phantom bridges at the Jefferson Proving Ground, the munitions testing facility near Madison that was established in a wooded area during the World War II era. At the proving ground, which was closed in 1995, Satolli was escorted by security officials to view the bridges (which are off-limits to the public) and see other historic sites.

A more typical phantom bridge, the Sparks Ferry Bridge that spans the East Fork of the White River in Jackson County, is the focus of one of Satolli's newest History in Your Own Backyard videos.

He also has featured the Princess Theatre in downtown Rushville, a cinema house built in 1915 that closed after more than 100 years. The building, still often called "the Princess" by locals, has been renovated and reopened as a city center, with the mayor's office on an upper floor that has ceilings 20 feet high.

Also in Rush County: scenic East Hill Cemetery, which Satolli notes is the burial site of 1940 Republican presidential candidate Wendell Willkie. Created in the 1850s with a "garden cemetery" design concept, East Hill was planned by a Prussian immigrant who had been the head gardener for one of the czars, according to History in Your Own Backyard.

Towns without a single stoplight that have been the focus of our guest Satolli Glassmeyer's videos - and that we will explore during our show - include Saint Paul (Decatur County), once the site of a major goldfish farm, and Dillsboro (Dearborn County), where a sanitarium was patronized by guests who savored its mineral waters and spas.

A former sheet metal worker, Satolli says he became fascinated by historic sites during weekend bicycle trips from his home when he was a teenager. His long cycling ventures, up to 100 miles round trip, would take him to neighboring towns, "where I began to fall in love with the buildings and bridges constructed in the late 1800s and early 1900s."

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April 17, 2021

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Bears at Riverside Park in Indianapolis? Not for the last century. But for nearly two decades beginning in 1899, a bear pit was among the most popular attractions at the park near the White River.

Consisting of a fenced, circular pen with two arched doorways that allowed the bears to enter a sheltered den, the bear pit at Riverside was featured on thousands of postcards that have become collectibles.

And the Riverside bear pit, although the longest-lasting and most significant local animal attraction during the era (it even sometimes was casually referred to as a "zoo"), wasn't the only collection of wildlife on display in Indianapolis parks.

The popularity of the attraction at Riverside led to a public exhibit of bears at Garfield Park beginning in 1905, according to research by attorney Ed Fujawa, who will be Nelson's guest. Monkeys also were exhibited for a few years at Garfield Park - as well as, even more briefly, at Brookside Park, where visitors also could gaze at exotic birds.

Ed, the creator of the history blog Class 900: Indianapolis, has written about the Riverside bear pit. An adventure lover, Ed hiked around Riverside to find remnants of the bygone bear pit, discovering the two arched doorways for the den amid trees, rocks and brush.

The Riverside animal attractions - which even included deer, elk, wolves and (briefly) two sea lions, - and at the other parks long predate what is considered to be the first official Indianapolis Zoo. It opened in 1964 in Washington Park with a collection of about 500 animals, according to the Encyclopedia of Indianapolis. The zoo at Washington Park closed in 1987, with a spectacular reopening later that year of the zoo at its current site in White River State Park.

Of the bygone Riverside Park bear pit, Ed Fujawa writes: "While the bears and other animals were popular with visitors, the conditions in which the animals were kept were not ideal." He describes letters of complaint in 1900 to Indianapolis newspapers.

Ed elaborates on the poor treatment of park animals at the time, calling them "disgraceful, especially when compared to modern standards. The animal pens were too small, especially for the bears, and the staff of the parks often did not take action to protect the animals from outside influences, such as visitors to the park, or natural disasters."

His blog post recounts floods of the nearby White River that resulted in "close calls" for the bears, who "climbed trees and logs placed in the pit to escape the encroaching water."

According to Ed, a female bear at Garfield Park named Minnie died in 1905 after being fed buckeyes by the public. Local newspapers speculated that buckeyes were poisonous to the bear.

With his Class 900 blog, Ed focuses on unearthing Indy history that's often been overlooked or forgotten. In 2020, he was a Hoosier History Live guest for a show about tree-planting crusades in Indy that began in the 1850s. Even then, city residents were worried about the loss of tree canopy in the urban area.

During the early 1900s, greenhouses at Garfield Park were used in the winter to house some of the animals from Riverside Park, including the monkeys, Ed says. Bears remained at Riverside, sheltering in their den during the winter.

In 1904 the bears managed to survive a flood of the nearby White River by climbing trees and logs (Ed describes the local newspaper accounts as "heartbreaking"), but some of the smaller animals and birds at Riverside drowned. The impact on the bear pit of the Great Flood of 1913, the worst flood in Indiana history, is unclear, Ed says.

When the last remaining bear at Riverside died in 1917, the animal display closed. The arched doorways of the den and other remnants of the bear pit are challenging to find today, Ed reports. "The site of the bear pit was later converted into a rock garden, which likely explains the numerous rocks spread throughout the site when I visited."

Like many other Indianapolis history lovers, Ed initially learned about the bygone bear pits at the parks by discovering vintage postcards depicting them. He reports that postcards of the animal exhibits are regularly sold on ebay and other sites featuring city memorabilia.

The Covid-19 pandemic obviously will be the focus of work by future historians. But enough history has unfolded already for Hoosier History Live to explore the beginnings of the health crisis in Indiana, including the first diagnosed case and the first death in the state.

During this show, we also will compare the spread in urban and rural areas, describe early challenges in contact tracing and explore other aspects of the emerging epidemic. Nelson will be joined by a journalist who has covered the impact of Covid-19 in Indiana since it entered public awareness.

Shari Rudavsky, the health and medical reporter for the Indianapolis Star, wrote a front-page story last month that described the earliest Hoosier cases of Covid-19 that "provided a harbinger of dark days." Shari, who has a PhD in the history and sociology of science, wrote about the state's first case, which was diagnosed in early March 2020. A patient at Community Hospital North in Indianapolis, the man (whose name has never been released) "was well enough to ride out his illness in a hotel quarantined from his family," Shari reported.

Much less fortunate a few weeks later was Roberta Shelton, 69, a beloved employee of a car rental company in Indianapolis and a tireless community volunteer known as "Birdie." She died at Community Hospital East and became the first coronavirus fatality in Indiana.

Also in March 2020, Shari wrote about the challenges that suddenly were confronting hospitals in rural areas and small cities, including Good Samaritan Hospital in Vincennes.

During our show, Shari and Nelson also will discuss an early outbreak in Logansport at a Tyson Foods meat-packing plant, the largest employer in Cass County.

Shari also will share insights about, as she puts it, "the challenges of explaining new terminology and new science - such as coronavirus, spike protein [and] other terms - that previously were unknown to most readers, including myself."

Last April, the state of Indiana signed a $43 million contract with Maximus, a health and human services provider, to assist state and local health departments in contact tracing. Analyzing the efforts several months later in an Indianapoli Star article, Shari wrote: "What effective contract tracing most requires is sufficient staff to reach out and conduct in-depth interviews with all touched by a virus. Until recently Indiana, like the rest of the nation, was woefully short-staffed."

Shari also reported on why simple preventative measures to stop the spread took a long time to get through to much of the public. Drawing a comparison with the push years ago regarding seat belts in cars, analysts noted to her that many people "fought back when public health officials first started recommending everyone buckle up."

Some Covid in Indiana history facts:

• The Hoosier diagnosed with the first case in the state "already suspected he had the virus" before he was tested at Community North, Shari reported. That meant the hospital staff could take proper precautions when he arrived.
• The extensive volunteer activities of Roberta "Birdie" Shelton, the first Hoosier to die from the coronavirus, included helping organize fund-raisers to assist the families of two girls from Delphi, Ind., who were murdered in 2017. The case, which continues to draw national publicity, remains unsolved.
• More than 12,840 people in Indiana have died of Covid-19. Since March 2020, more than 710,600 Hoosiers have tested positive for the coronavirus.

Even though we're just past Women's History Month, it's never a bad time to spotlight the impact of an Indiana architectural trail-blazer who had both pizzazz and spunk.

Beginning in the 1950s, when women home builders were a rarity, Avriel Shull designed and built mid-century modern homes in Carmel, Indianapolis and other Hoosier cities. National periodicals eventually distributed the house plans of "Avriel" (she often was referred to by her first name only), with orders for her home patterns continuing long after she died in her mid-40s in 1976.

"Years before branding became an essential component of business success, Avriel was both a well-known company brand and a synonym for modern design," according to our guest, Connie Zeigler, owner of C. Resources, on this encore of a show originally broadcast in 2019. A historian, researcher and preservationist, Connie prepared the nomination for the National Register of Historic Places of the Thornhurst subdivision in Carmel, where Avriel designed 21 mid-century modern homes.

Connie also prepared a National Register nomination for Ladywood Estates, an apartment complex (now condos) in Indianapolis designed by Avriel that opened in 1967.

Just as Avriel's homes created something of a stir - with their floor-to-ceiling windows, sliding glass doors, vertical cedar siding and walled patios during an era noted for basic ranch houses - red-haired, charismatic Avriel drew attention on a personal level as well.

In 1951, Life magazine devoted a multi-page photo spread to her splashy wedding, during which Avriel entered amid a release of white birds; at 2 a.m., she lifted her white gown to perform the can-can.

Her husband was one of Indiana's best-known journalists of the era. An irreverent TV columnist for the Indianapolis News (and, before that, for the Indianapolis Times), R.K. Shull also answered reader questions in "Shull's Mailbag," which appeared in 260 newspapers across the country.

None of that overshadowed his wife, who, as Connie has written, "lived life at breakneck speed."

According to Connie, Avriel "often laid the stone herself on the houses she designed." As for an enduring architectural legacy, Connie notes that "At least 100, and probably more, of her houses are still standing in central Indiana."

But Avriel was not an architect. In fact, although she studied at what was then the John Herron Art Institute during the 1940s, Avriel never earned a college degree.

In all of her Thornhurst subdivision houses - which were the focus of a 2017 home tour organized by the Carmel Clay Historical Society - Avriel featured modern fireplaces, some of which she built herself.

In a cover story about Avriel for a 2012 issue of Traces magazine published by the Indiana Historical Society, Connie notes that many of the fireplaces "had two-sided hearths opening into two different rooms."

Connie writes that for home interiors, Avriel chose vinyl-topped stools, tripod-legged lamps and sofas with hairpin legs, "unlike the ruffled sofas and overstuffed chairs of earlier eras." In many of the bathrooms, she painted murals - and added an elaborate "Avriel" as a signature to her work.

By the mid-1960s, Avriel landed contracts to design homes in upscale neighborhoods on the northside of Indianapolis including Avalon Hills, Crow's Nest, Meridian Hills and Sunset Lane. In the final years before her death just shy of her 45th birthday, Avriel was building houses in Brownsburg, Kokomo, Westfield and Evansville.

Our guest Connie Zeigler, after a long, influential career focused primarily on Indianapolis-area history and architecture, moved last month to Providence, R.I.

"I'll continue to do research and writing on a variety of design and architecture-related subjects," she reports, "including a book on several unheralded women designers married to well-known architects from the mid-20th century."

Indiana wants me Lord, I can't go back there.

Those were the opening lines of a pop song that became a hit in 1970, rising to No. 5 on the Billboard Top 100 list. True crime author Andrew Stoner uses the song, Indiana Wants Me, in his newest book as an entree to exploring fugitives and prison escapees throughout more than 100 years of Indiana history.

To discuss several of the cases described in Wanted in Indiana: Infamous Hoosier Fugitives (The History Press) - including the assassination attempt in 1980 of a national civil rights leader in Fort Wayne that returned to the headlines this month - Andrew will be Nelson's guest. A native of Goshen and a former civilian spokesman for the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department, Andrew now is an associate professor of communications studies at California State University in Sacramento.

During our show, we will explore two cases connected to the FBI that illustrate advances in techniques for tracking down criminals. An escapee in 1919 from the Indiana State Prison in Michigan City was not found until the 1940s, when the FBI's fingerprint detection techniques finally resulted in his identification after a traffic stop in California. In 1960, a robber of banks in Logansport and Hamlet, Ind., made the FBI's Most Wanted List - and was captured just 24 hours later.

In 1980, racist Joseph Paul Franklin committed two shootings in Indiana (one of them fatal) before attempting to assassinate Vernon Jordan, president of the National Urban League, during his trip to Fort Wayne for the organization's annual meeting. Using a hunting rifle, Franklin shot Jordan in the back.

Following a long recovery that made national news, Jordan survived and continued as a close advisor to U.S. presidents, including Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. During our show, Andrew will describe how Franklin was tracked down after several months and more shootings. When Jordan died this month at age 85, the horrific episode in Fort Wayne was recounted in his obituaries.

Also during our show, Andrew and Nelson will explore the cases of:

• Leslie "Mad Dog" Irvin, a notorious killer who escaped from the Gibson County Jail in southwestern Indiana in 1956. One of the cases involving Irvin, who was accused in multiple shootings, made it all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, where it set a precedent involving pretrial publicity.
• Two women who escaped, separately, from the Indiana Women's Prison when it was located on the near-eastside of Indianapolis. One of the women was not found for 35 years; the other spent many years living, crime-free, just a few blocks from the prison.
• And a 15-year-old from Tippecanoe County who fled in 1942 after being accused of several crimes. Even though Floyd Loveless was a juvenile, he eventually was executed in Nevada after shooting a constable; the case illustrates the differences in the imposition of the death penalty since the 1940s.

As a break from exploring the violent crimes, Andrew and Nelson also will discuss the colorful history of the 1970 song "Indiana Wants Me." Written and performed by Toronto native R. Dean Taylor - it was his only hit, according to Wanted in Indiana - the song remained on Billboard's charts for 15 weeks. Later, it was included on a list of the "52 Most Depressing Songs You've Ever Heard."

She was the victim of one of the most lurid crimes in Indiana history, the brutal rape in March 1925 by D.C. Stephenson, Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, that led to her eventual death after a suicide attempt. The deathbed testimony of Madge Oberholtzer, a resident of the Irvington neighborhood of Indianapolis, resulted in the eventual conviction of Stephenson of second degree murder, a pivotal episode in the downfall of the Klan in Indiana during the 1920s.

For several years, Charlotte Ottinger, a registered nurse who has lived in Irvington for more than 20 years, has been working on a biography of Madge, digging up new information about the 28-year-old state employee and former teacher. Madge Oberholtzer was raped during a train trip to Chicago with Stephenson, who also lived in Irvington. One of his associates accompanied them on the trip.

Charlotte, who is convinced Madge did not willingly go on the train trip, will be Nelson's guest to discuss her extensive research. She has interviewed four grandchildren of Madge's brother, who have given her family documents, photos and other artifacts never seen by the general public or used by other researchers. Some of the material is now in the archives of the Irvington Historical Society; Charlotte is a former board member.

There's even a Women's History Month aspect for our show. According to Charlotte's research into Madge's youth, she was mentored by several Indiana suffragists. Madge graduated from Manual High School in 1914 and attended Butler University, which then was Butler College and located in Irvington. According to Charlotte, the talent in painting and drawing that Madge displayed at Manual earned her scholarships to study at the Herron School of Art.

During our show, Charlotte will describe the impact of Madge's tragic death on her family. Madge's mother, Matilda Oberholtzer, was a short-term patient in a sanitarium in Martinsville after her daughter's death.

An American Sign Language medical interpreter as well as a nurse, Charlotte says her medical background helped her sort through the treatment provided to Madge, the autopsy results and the extensive medical testimony at Stephenson's sensational trial. After her brutal rape in Stephenson's private train car, Madge swallowed poison in a hotel room in Hammond.

Hoosier History Live has discussed the frightening power of Stephenson - who once declared "I am the law in Indiana" - during previous shows. They have included a show last September in which Nelson interviewed James Madison, author of The Ku Klux Klan in the Heartland (IU Press).

Charlotte's book, tentatively titled The Life and Times of Madge Oberholtzer, is scheduled for publication in October.

At the time of her death, Madge was working at the Indiana Statehouse as the manager of the Young People's Reading Circle, a lending library program for teachers organized by the Department of Education (then called the Department of Public Instruction). Madge was living with her parents in their home in Irvington. That house, as well as the residence of D.C. Stephenson, are still standing and privately owned.

According to Charlotte, other women had been physically and sexually assaulted by Stephenson (1891-1966). "None of them came forward to expose him," Charlotte notes. "Madge was the only woman who publicly exposed him."

A native of Texas, Stephenson already had abandoned a wife and daughter in Oklahoma before arriving in Indiana in 1920, according to Grand Dragon: D.C. Stephenson and the Ku Klux Klan in Indiana (Purdue University Press, 1991) by William Lutholtz. Stephenson, Lutholtz wrote, was a chronic liar who "told so many lies so often that it's difficult to know the truth" about his early life.

Following Madge's death in 1925 in her family's home - where Stephenson had her returned after the train trip - his trial for second-degree murder was held at the Hamilton County Courthouse in Noblesville. Charlotte Ottinger notes that Madge's father died two years later, "some say of a broken heart."

Both were pioneer aviators and heroic World War I fighter pilots from Indiana, and both were killed while flying aircraft overseas.

And Weir Cook and Paul Baer once were the namesakes of the airports in the two largest cities in their home state. Today, although those airports are officially called Indianapolis International Airport and Fort Wayne International Airport, the terminal buildings at each still carry the name of these two great airmen.

To explore the lives of the aviators who earned national acclaim for their valor during what once was known as the Great War, Nelson is joined by two guests in this encore of a show originally broadcast in 2018. The guests are:

• William Bell, an Indianapolis-based writer and retired law enforcement officer who has researched Hancock County native Weir Cook (1892-1943), recipient of the Distinguished Service Cross in World War I. Cook also was hailed as a hero during World War II even though he was well into his 40s when he returned to the Army Air Corp and flew combat missions over the Pacific.

• And Tony Garel-Frantzen of Fort Myers, Fla., the author of Hoosier Aviator Paul Baer: America's First Combat Ace (The History Press, 2017). In his biography of Baer (1894-1930), Tony contends the Fort Wayne native became the first American to shoot down an enemy plane in combat and the first to earn the title of "combat ace." Tony writes that Baer's historic achievements often have been overlooked because he flew for a French squadron prior to the United States' entry into World War I.

The designation of "combat ace," which both Cook and Baer achieved, is given to pilots who accomplish five aerial victories during warfare.

After World War I, Cook helped develop the first municipal airport in Indianapolis, which opened in 1931; he also became its first manager. Following Cook's reenlistment during World War II, he commanded air bases on islands in the Pacific.

After Cook was killed while flying a combat mission, the Indianapolis airport at Indianapolis was named Weir Cook Airport. In 1976, its name was changed to Indianapolis International Airport, outraging many veterans groups.

When the city's newly constructed airport opened at its current site in 2008, the mid-field terminal and the roadway leading to it were named in Cook's honor.

In Fort Wayne, Baer had grown up as a shy but adventure-seeking youth, according to Hoosier Aviator. After France declared war on Germany in 1914, Baer was among a few American volunteers who signed up to fight on the side of the French; America did not declare war until 1917. As a combat pilot, Baer flew missions for both France and the United States.

While working as a commercial pilot for a Chinese airline in 1930, Baer was killed in an aircraft accident near Shanghai. In his honor, the Fort Wayne airport was called Baer Field until the early 1990s, when it was renamed Fort Wayne International Airport.

Like Baer, Weir Cook received his initial flight training in France. He was born Harvey Weir Cook in the small Hancock County town of Wilkinson, where a community park has been named in his honor. Cook grew up in Anderson, graduated from Anderson High School and attended both DePauw University and Washington & Jefferson College before moving to France at the outbreak of World War I.

During the war, Cook downed at least seven enemy aircraft and was promoted to flight commander of the 94th Aero Squadron, a pursuit (fighter) unit of the U.S. Army Air Service. After the war, Cook undertook many roles in the civilian aviation industry and helped bring the first municipal airport to Indianapolis. He was killed during World War II in a crash while flying a P-39 Bell Airacobra fighter plane over the Pacific island of New Caledonia.

During World War I, Baer achieved his first aerial victory in March 1918, shooting down a German fighter plane while flying for a French squadron. That victory - which was quickly followed by others - made Baer the first U.S. pilot to shoot down an enemy plane in warfare, according to Tony Garel-Frantzen's biography.

By mid-April 1918, Baer had felled five enemy planes, making him the first American combat ace, Tony writes.

In May 1918, Baer's plane was shot down. Although he escaped serious injuries, Baer became a prisoner of war and spent time in several German prisons.

"True to his reticent nature," Tony writes, "Baer rarely spoke in detail while he was alive about the day he was shot down or about the months he spent in captivity."

As Hoosier History Live salutes Women's History Month, we will explore a range of aspects associated with women who have served in the Indiana General Assembly and as state and federal officials from the Hoosier state.

What questions have been asked of women candidates for public office that have not been posed to their male counterparts? What's been the percentage of female lawmakers at the Indiana Statehouse? Why has Indiana's lieutenant governor frequently been a woman during the last 20 years, but a woman never has served as governor?

Not only will we delve into those questions, we even will look at the number of women honored with statues and marble busts at the Indiana Capitol Building, compared with those that commemorate men.

The latter issue was the focus of a column a few years ago by the acclaimed, retired political journalist who will be Nelson's guest in this show on women's history in Indiana. Beginning in 1991, Mary Beth Schneider covered every session of the General Assembly for the Indianapolis Star until 2013. She also covered national political conventions, presidential debates and the caucuses and primaries in Iowa, New Hampshire and other states.

During her career at the Star, which began in 1979, Mary Beth covered a variety of other beats and served as an assistant city editor; in 2019 and 2020, she wrote a weekly political column and edited stories for TheStatehouseFile.com, a news service run by Franklin College students.

According to state legislative records, women lawmakers make up about 21 percent of the current General Assembly. Of the nine members of the U.S. Congress from Indiana, two are women. Since 2003, when Gov. Joe Kernan appointed Kathy Davis, a Democrat from Indianapolis, as the first women lieutenant governor in Indiana's history (her successor, Becky Skillman, a Republican from Bedford, became the first woman elected to the position, serving two terms under Gov. Mitch Daniels), the state's No. 2 post has been held by a woman except for about nine months in 2016. That's when current governor Eric Holcomb had the job.

Not only hasn't a woman ever served as governor of Indiana, a woman has never been mayor of the state's largest city. Since 1995, three women have been nominated by the major political parties for mayor of Indianapolis, but all of them were unsuccessful. In 1999, Sue Anne Gilroy, a Republican, was defeated by Bart Peterson. Melina Kennedy, a Democrat who was deputy mayor under Peterson, lost her mayoral campaign in 2011 to incumbent Greg Ballard. Back in 1995, Z. Mae Jimison, a Democrat, also lost to the incumbent mayor, Steve Goldsmith.

When Gilroy ran her campaign for mayor, she was serving as Indiana's secretary of state. The current secretary of state also is a woman. Last month, Connie Lawson, a Republican from Hendricks County, announced she will be stepping down to, in her words, "focus on my health and my family."

Lawson, who has been in the post since 2012, is the longest-serving secretary of state in Indiana history. Before becoming secretary of state, she served for 16 years in the Indiana Senate. In 2006, Lawson made history by becoming the first woman to serve as a majority floor leader in the senate.

Some history facts:

• In 1920, the year that women achieved the right to vote with the ratification of the 19th Amendment, the first woman was elected to the Indiana legislature. She was Julia Nelson, a Republican from Muncie.
• The first woman elected to the U.S. Congress from Indiana was Virginia Jenckes, a Democrat from Terre Haute. Hoosier History Live discussed Jenckes, who was elected in 1932, during a show last March that focused on Hoosier women who advocated for suffrage.
• In a 2019 column for TheStatehouseFile.com, our guest Mary Beth Schneider noted that the second floor of the Indiana Capitol Building has seven busts, all of them men. All of the eight busts on the third floor also honor men except for one, a bust commemorating the late U.S. Rep. Julia Carson.