Just as there were rules against having fun at school dances, we had some pretty interesting dress codes, with punishment for violators ranging from suspensions to getting smashed over the head with a chair. My school’s comparatively liberal policy provided that in temperatures well below freezing, the girls could wear slacks. Join us in reminiscing about simpler conflicts — culottes, sideburns and Nehru jackets — that we could only wish today were our most pressing problems.

As hapless parents in Southern Indiana, we were almost overwhelmed with the number of things that could cause us considerable embarrassment, not the least of which was the chore of talking to our children about the birds and the bees. Starting in the late 1960’s, the school systems tried to come to our rescue by adopting sex education curricula. Those courses turned out to consist of few facts and a lot of throat clearing.

History tended to get buried quickly in Southern Indiana, but we always had faith in folks helping us find things we may have lost, including Christmas. In this episode we share some old news items about things or pigs folks lost at Christmas time as well as buried skating rinks, Mastadons, entire towns, and way stations along the Underground Railroad.

There’s nothing quite so irksome as being attacked by a wild animal you didn’t even know existed. Meet the coywolf, our newest neighbor in the suburbs and a much more handsome relative of the coyote but also kind of a junior wolf, and listen to a few tips on how to get past that awkward first encounter.

We were more than a little nervous about dreaming big in Southern Indiana, as it called attention to us and posed the risk of being ridiculed, which was the fate met by the folks who once dreamed of building a replica of the Great Pyramid out of limestone or, failing that, a limestone replica of the Great Wall of China. You can probably guess how all that turned out.

My Aunt Teddy and Uncle Happy liked playing practical jokes that involved pretending they were dying. As we delve again into Southern Indiana history, we see that sometimes practical jokers don’t have to pretend.

They had a lot of rules back in the 1960’s designed to discourage young people from having any fun, and it started with dancing regulations. The Devil is in the details.

Not that we had a choice growing up in Southern Indiana, but there were pluses and minuses of life in the country verses the big city. So here is a list of a few of each.

There’s a fancy name for the Southern Indiana dialect; but growing up, we just knew we sounded different from folks up north in Indianapolis. Join in to hear some descriptions of how and speculations about why we talk different in the land where I grew up.