User:Cuppysfriend

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I live in Will Cuppy's hometown, Auburn, Indiana, and have made a hobby of researching his life and family history. My humble contributions to Wikipedia are based on the principle that one thing leads to another. Besides starting the article on Cuppy, I expanded the one on Auburn. I contributed an article on Cedar Creek, which flows through Auburn, and one on the Eel River, which centuries ago formed a single stream with Cedar Creek and where Cuppy played as a boy when he visited his grandmother's farm near South Whitley.

Writing about Cuppy naturally led to an article about 15017 Cuppy, the asteroid named for him. That, in turn, led to my adding many names to the list of asteroids named after people. One of those, 1761 Edmondson, was named after Frank K. Edmondson, who taught my astronomy class at Indiana University. So I wrote an article about him, but not before I contributed a few extra facts to the article on his hero Daniel Kirkwood and wrote one about asteroid 1578 Kirkwood, which Edmondson rediscovered after it was "lost" during World War II. I also wrote an article about Edmondson's Indiana Asteroid Program, which discovered or rediscovered 119 asteroids in the days before computerized sky-scans took over the job of finding near-Earth objects that might whack us into extinction. Sometime during the Cretaceous, something big really did whack Indiana just east of a bullseye marked by the intersection of U.S. Highways 24 and 41 in Newton County, creating the Kentland crater. My effort to expand the crater article collided with a simultaneous edit by Wetman. We worked it out.

Getting back to Auburn, I wrote an article on the extinct Auburn Automobile Company and on the company's best-known designer, Gordon Miller Buehrig, whose cousin Edward Buehrig was my polisci prof at Indiana University. Extinction is also the theme of my article on Pipe Creek Sinkhole, a paleontological dig in Grant County, Indiana supervised by my friend Jim Farlow of Indiana University-Purdue University at Fort Wayne. If I hadn't known about Pipe Creek, then I wouldn't have started the article about the Gray Fossil Site in Tennessee.

But I was talking about Auburn, wasn't I? James Indus Farley, a New Deal-era congressman who knew my father lived here, so I figured that if I didn't write something about him no one would. Ralph Austin Bard didn't live here, but he knew Farley when both were associated with the Auburn Automobile Company. Bard became Under Secretary of the Navy during World War II and sent a famous memorandum to Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson saying that we shouldn't drop the atomic bomb on Japan without fair warning. Bard was a quiet, self-effacing man, which made his dissent from the collective judgment of the Interim Committee that the bomb should be used without warning speak all the louder.

Auburn is where the dominoes began to fall that led to the United States Supreme Court's decision in Stump v. Sparkman, a troubling case that warns us that the people sitting next to us in church might differ from the "good Germans" of the 1930s only by the accidents of history and geography.

Then there are my articles on the Bancroft Treaties and the abolitionist Calvin Fairbank. How do I connect to them? Well, I tripped across the Bancroft Treaties in the 1970s when I worked at the US Department of State. Prodding the right people to get rid of them before they caused real mischief might be my only contribution to international law.

I tripped over the Rev. Fairbank while looking for information on Will Cuppy's mother's third husband's younger brother, Rev. Aaron Lilly. There's no connection whatever between them except that someone with the same name is buried in the same cemetery as Fairbank. If there were any real logic to things, I should have found Fairbank when I was researching my great-grandmother's second husband's older brother who married the daughter of a reputed Underground Railroad activist.

On my "to do" list, I'd like to expand the article (someone beat me to writing the stub) on Indiana novelist Ross Lockridge, Jr., author of Raintree County, who, like Will Cuppy, was a child of the Eel River. He's also buried in the same cemetery as Daniel Kirkwood.

Rollie Zeider, a professional baseball player who held the rookie record for stolen bases longer than most people live, grew up in Auburn and is buried here; but he was born in a little crossroads town near Logansport named Hoover, which just happens to be located on...you guessed it...the Eel River! I didn't start the article about him, but I contributed a few biographical facts that were easy for me to dig out from local records. After he retired from baseball, Rollie (or "Polly" as he was known around here) opened a tavern in Garrett, a nearby town with which Auburn had a longstanding high school sports rivalry. That might account for a certain coolness in Auburn toward someone who probably should be celebrated as our local link to baseball's golden age. My father liked to go to "Polly Zeider's."

I did, however, start the article on Don Lash, the track and field star who won the 1938 James E. Sullivan Award as America's top amateur athlete. Lash was born in Bluffton, but grew up in Auburn, where legend has it that his high school coach kept him out of football so that he wouldn't injure himself. Good thing, too. Lash was a phenomenon of long-distance running. Although he failed to win a single medal at the 1936 Olympics, those were virtually the only races he ever lost. I met him when I was in high school. He was friendly, calm and self-possessed, having nothing of the chest-thumping egotism that tarnishes so much of today's sports scene. He was a gentleman of the old school.