CHAPTER 1

Tip County

Tippecanoe County sits in central western Indiana. This story is about the people of Tip County, as the residents call the place, and about one man in particular, James Elroy "Roy" Emerson, whom his friends call Roy or Roy E., the newly elected county prosecuting attorney.

Interstate 70 out of Indianapolis going west to Saint Louis, Missouri, bisects Tippecanoe County. High school students say North Tip is the sophisticated part of the county, running from the interstate north to the Crawford County Line. South Tip, on the other side of the interstate, is mostly rural — good farmland and lowland running through the Eel River country to the White River. South Tip people resent the airs of North Tip residents.

Tippecanoe County is home to some 220,000 souls, give or take a few hundred. James Elroy Emerson (hereafter referred to in our story as Roy) knows this to be a fact because he's just run for prosecutor there — it's a bigger county than meets the eye. The voting rolls carry many fewer residents than people, and there are still many hundreds on the city, village, and township clerks' election rolls who don't vote in Tip County anymore, having previously taken off for Terre Haute and points west.

Industry has come to Tippecanoe County within the past decade, recent additions being a vehicle assembly plant and a large steel plant to supply steel plating to the vehicle assembly factory. The auto company bought up a huge chunk of farmland east of Terre Haute, built a truck-and-bus plant there, and brought in a few thousand auto workers to staff the productions lines. The steel company, in building its factory to supply sheet metal to the auto plant, took another hunk of farmland out of production and set up a sheet-metal-and-rolled-steel manufacturing facility within a short commute to the auto factory.

The industrial complexes are in Tippecanoe County and in Terre Haute's county, Monroe. A political compromise brought them there — the elected boards of county commissioners from both counties got into a bidding war for the plants and offered so many tax abatements that the state's governor became alarmed, got into the act, cracked a few heads, and forced a compromise between the county boards. So that's why the auto company's plant is in Monroe County and the steel company's facilities are in Tippecanoe County.

Following the construction of the steel plant, an influx of workers came into the area. Line workers and craft people from the mills of Youngstown and Pittsburg were glad to get steady work in Tip County, even though they were far away from relatives and friends in their beloved Allegheny Mountains. Jobs at both factories drew unemployed people and underemployed individuals from throughout Indiana and Illinois, and a goodly portion of the new hires migrated from the upper southern states of Kentucky, Tennessee, and Arkansas.

As a result of the infusion of newcomers, there was a distinctly southern flavor in and around the auto and steel plants, and many an old Rebel battle flag could be seen fluttering from radio antennae of trucks in factory parking lots. Country and western is the music of choice, and Walmart (built in a minimall at the Decatur exit from Interstate 70) does a booming business in work shirts and blue jeans. Chevy and Ford trucks are the most popular means of conveyance, and God help anyone who parks a Japanese car in a plant employee parking lot. It'll get keyed or have tires flattened quicker than the owner can say Toyota.

CHAPTER 2

Tip's Politics

One would think from all this building that Tippecanoe County would vote Democratic, influenced by the labor unions and the new workers. But it doesn't; Tip County is solidly Republican, and it has been for as long as anybody can remember.

Up in the county seat, Decatur in North Tip, the country reapportionment boards have done their jobs well over the years, crafting and gerrymandering the voting districts so that Republican control was assured. The county legislative body — called the County Board of Commissioners — has been solidly Republican for decades, except for one session in President Franklin D. Roosevelt's first term, when the voters took out their Depression-bred frustrations on the Republican farmer-legislators in the old county board of supervisors and voted in some union people.

But the union people lasted only one term, and pretty soon it was back to business as usual at the courthouse, with the Republican old guard in control. This political oligarchy changed when James Elroy Emerson was elected as county prosecutor.

As industry began to remold the countryside, more minorities began to appear — members of labor unions with money in their pockets and middle-class values in their minds. There had always been African Americans in Tippecanoe County because one of the many termini of the prior century's underground slave railroad ended in nearby Vincennes, and church people in Tippecanoe County made welcome the escaped slaves and their families in Decatur and the surrounding communities.

Many former slaves were given small pieces of land to work, and they farmed them until they got legal titles. They and their offspring stayed on the land, generally maintaining low profiles, except for those few who migrated into the cities and villages of Tippecanoe and took the menial jobs to which they were consigned by racial segregation.

Mexican American migrants worked the fields of Tippecanoe County to bring in the crops, but this was a seasonal group, and only a few got off the migrant trail and settled down. Those who did so generally put down their roots close to Decatur, although a few hundred permanent Mexican American residents located in and around Dansville, a large village in South Tip.

Making steel is hot business, and some hardy Eastern Europeans (Croats, Romanians, Bulgars, and Ukrainians) came down to the steel company from Chicago and took jobs as puddlers and ladle operators. None but these seemed to be able to stand the intense heat around the furnaces.

Irish immigrant farmers had worked the fields for many generations as tenants, and some got titles to their own land. Most of the Irish, though, worked for German titleholders, and the Irish children didn't want to do tenant farming as their parents had. Instead, when the Irish kids finished high school or dropped out before graduation, they migrated away to get trade and vocational education; if they returned to Tippecanoe County, they generally settled in the cities and villages.

There were merchant families of English origin and Jewish refugees from the pogroms of Russia and Eastern Europe who came to Decatur and, after years of hard work, acquired their own grocery, drug goods, and laundry businesses. There were just a few Asian Pacific Islander Americans.

CHAPTER 3

Roy's Family

Mother and Father Emerson were a mixture of several nationalities, so it isn't possible to say they were German, Irish, or Scandinavian. As far as Mother and Father Emerson were concerned, they were just Americans and spoke only the English language.

Both of Roy's parents were educated through grade school but had very little high school education. They came from poor families in Pittsburg and had to go to work to help their parents, who were not in the best of health. Paul Emerson, Roy's father, was a hulk of a man who worked in a steel mill in Pittsburg and met Mary Emerson, Roy's mother, who worked in the factory cafeteria. They fell in love, and little Roy was conceived prior to nuptials.

Being decent people, the Emersons married before Roy's birth so that he would have both a mother's name and a father's name on his birth certificate. A couple of years later, the Emersons gave birth to a pretty little girl, Emily, who was the apple of their eye. Roy was a kinda mischievous child; he had a pretty good build, favoring his father, but he was a little on the short side, favoring his mother. His sister, Emily, favored Roy's mother, who had been a beauty in her early years but whose good looks had been worn down by years of hard work and poverty.

When the family moved from Pittsburg to Tippecanoe County so that Father Emerson could take a job in the steel mill, the family had very little money. They could not afford housing in North Tip, so they settled in a mobile home park in South Tip, and Roy and Emily grew up in the park, much to their chagrin, as the kids in school taunted them, calling them trailer trash.

Roy was good with his fists, and although he was of short stature, he was extremely strong. Roy usually made short work of anyone challenging him or Emily or calling them names, and the offender didn't repeat those mistakes again. Roy was not a very good student, but he tried. Emily was a much better student and helped Roy with his homework and his tests. Roy's mother, Mary, although not formally educated, was an intelligent woman, and she pitched in with Emily to see to it that Roy got through grade school.

CHAPTER 4

Roy's schooling and Talents

Roy attended Tippecanoe County Grade School No. 1, which gave an elementary education from kindergarten through eighth grade. Roy passed all his grades but was certainly not at the head of his class. Tippecanoe No. 1, however, had athletics for boys and girls in the seventh and eighth grades — football, basketball, and baseball for boys, and basketball and swimming for girls. As soon as Roy reached seventh grade, he tried out for the football team.

Watching him tackle and block, the coaches decided he was the ideal man for the offensive and defensive lines. His blocking and tackling were so good — although he was slow as molasses on pull plays — that he was assigned to the eighth grade team. For two years he played on the offensive and defensive lines of the eighth grade team. He was a tough blocker and could tackle and go after the quarterback if he could get though the opposition team's offensive linemen. A number of times his opponents took a swing at him; he held his own in any on-field altercations, although the officials and his own coaches told him repeatedly to behave himself and follow the rules. Yet he would just be reprimanded because his honest-looking face and believable lies would always convince the officials and his coaches that the other guys had started the trouble.

High school coaches scouted the teams from North Tip and South Tip, and Roy's play on offense and defense for Tippecanoe No. 1 caught their eye. He was recruited to go to Calvin Coolidge High School in South Tip to play football, even though his grades coming out of elementary school were not exemplary. He completed his studies in eighth grade, and his mother and father enrolled him in Calvin Coolidge as a freshman. His sister, Emily, was still at Tippecanoe No. 1 and was a top student in all her classes there.

As a freshman, Roy was a tough customer on the football field. He was too rough to play freshman football; the coaches raised him up to the junior varsity team to play with sophomores and some juniors. The coaches, who were very supportive of Roy (knowing that he was poor kid from the trailer park in South Tip), played him as a starter on the JV football team, going both ways on the offensive line and as a "nose tackle" on defense.

Roy often got beaten up pretty badly in each game, but he didn't complain and was considered a tough kid. Nobody messed with him in high school. Unfortunately, because of his father's hours at the steel plan and his mother's hours working in the plant's cafeteria, they were not able to watch and cheer Roy along at many of his elementary and high school games.

Roy just barely passed his classes as a freshman. In the summer months, he worked out in the high school gym's weight room and became very strong. When the two-a-day practices started for football in August, Roy was in top shape. He was still aggressive in his play on the offensive and defensive lines, and when some of the seniors were injured in the early games of Roy's sophomore year, the coaches moved him from the JV to the varsity team. Even though he was a sophomore member of the varsity team, he soon became a starter and played very aggressively, going both ways. The coaches were pleased with his enthusiasm. He just barely got through his sophomore year, grade-wise, with tutoring from his mother and Emily.

Going into his junior year, he followed his same summer schedule: some work down at the grocery store as a bag boy but a maximum amount of time in the weight room at the high school gym. He appeared for his two-a-day practices in his junior year in top physical condition, and the coaches placed him as a starter at left tackle on the offensive line and nose tackle on the defensive line.

Roy wasn't much of a runner, but he was a punishing blocker and really fought his way through the opponents' offensive line to get to the opposing quarterback, halfback, or fullback carrying the ball. He was fearless and took on big guys without any hesitation. Once in a while he would get knocked down on the field, but after a short rest, he would always go back into the action and finish the game. The coaches were impressed. He just barely passed his junior year tests, but he was promoted after some summer schooling.

In his senior year, Roy was the starting left tackle and nose tackle. He played hard all season, and his team won the conference title but lost in the district playoffs. His team just couldn't seem to score against the team from Terre Haute. College coaches scouted Roy in his senior year when he was named All Conference, First Team, Offense and Defense. However, they saw that Roy was a slow runner, and his slowness (despite his aggressiveness and spirited play) was not in accord with the playbooks of Division I colleges in Indiana.

Nevertheless, Roy was given a shot at the team at Boyne College in Crawfordville, Indiana, where he was given a grant in aid. Boyne, an all-boys school (one of the last few in the United States), was one of the Indiana Ivy League colleges, and it had a pretty good football team and good coaching staff. But Boyne's administrators insisted on proper performance in the classroom and in one's own demeanor, as a representative of the college. A list of social rules was to be enforced with the student body, particularly those involved in the fraternities.

Roy worked out all summer in the weight room at Calvin Coolidge High School in preparation for his freshman year at Boyne. He showed up for August two-a-days at Boyne in top physical condition, in better shape than the upperclassmen who had been through spring practice but had gotten a little sloppy in the summer months. Watching Roy play, the coaches felt he was too strong and aggressive to play on the freshman or JV teams, and he was promoted to the varsity team even as a freshman (something that is very unusual for an offensive or defensive lineman with slow feet). In his first varsity game he was a backup, but both the offensive tackle and noseguard were injured early, and Roy was sent in to play. He did well for his first college varsity outings and remained a starter.

CHAPTER 5

Roy's Boyne college fraternity Career

Roy would have had a moderately successful college career, and a powerful Boyne Alumni Association (very loyal to the college, its faculty, staff, alumni, and students) would have placed Roy after his graduation in a successful job — but it was not to be for Roy.

Roy's downfall was his drinking and his poor academic performance. Although he was a starting offensive player on the college's football team, most of the Boyne fraternities overlooked him. There was one fraternity, though, that paid particular attention to Roy. Its initials were TKD. Roy could never really behave himself at fraternity rush parties; his drink of choice was a half pint of peppermint schnapps, chased down with a large bag of corn nuts. He had few social skills around the ladies, who, although not enrolled at Boyne, were an important part of the social scene on campus. Only TKD offered Roy a bid to join as a pledge, and he accepted.