Remember when Hickory Beat Middletown for the State Basketball Championship? | Post 20 | Indiana
Quiz: What team did Milan defeat to win the 1954 Indiana high school basketball championship game? Answer: Muncie Central. Here’s Muncie Central High School today:
Muncie is the answer to another trivia question — what is the most studied town in America? — and, remarkably, between these two questions I’ve covered huge swaths of small town America lore.
The first is a bit of a red herring and puts me on the precipice of grossly violating this virtual cross-country trip’s parameters, for Milan is the true hero of that quiz question — and I’ve come nowhere near Milan since passing into Indiana from Ohio. But, if Texas means football, Indiana means basketball, and I feel obliged to leverage Muncie Central’s loss into a mention of one of American sports’ greatest David defeats Goliath moments.
In short, in 1954, Milan High School, with just 161 students, became the smallest school ever to win the Indiana state basketball title. Until 1997, Indiana ran a one-class high school basketball tournament, meaning all schools, regardless of enrollment size, entered the same statewide all-comers knockout tournament. To win the championship, rural Milan defeated teams from cities like Terre Haute and Indianapolis, and then four-time state champions Muncie Central, which some sources indicate had an enrollment 10 times Milan’s (far larger than Milan’s entire population).
Upon arrival in Muncie, I took a Street View quantum leap to Milan, where the water tower still proclaims “STATE CHAMPS 1954”:
Hollywood portrayed this fairy tale victory in the 1986 movie Hoosiers — fictional Hickory High School playing the role of Milan — but, in reality, Milan was hardly an underdog. The school had reached the state semifinals the previous year, and small schools regularly made deep runs in the Indiana tournament. Milan, in fact, ran into trouble in the pre-quarterfinal round in 1954, pulling out a close victory against Montezuma, enrollment 79.
What made the improbable somewhat probable in Indiana? Wikipedia notes that “Historically, each of the several hundred small towns of Indiana had its own small school system.” It wasn’t until the latter half of the 20th century that Indiana began consolidating rural school districts, and only then did a second trend, rural migration to cities, really push up enrollments at more urban high schools. So size mismatches weren’t as prevalent or severe as one might expect and, furthermore, basketball, requiring only five players, was the perfect sport for those hundreds and hundreds of tiny schools. They played. And since basketball is a sport where a single star player or two can carry a team — the 1954 Milan team returned four starters from the 1953 semifinalist team — David could indeed beat Goliath every now and then.
While basketball fans (and movie buffs) know Milan as Hickory, sociologists and historians know Muncie as Middletown. In the late 1920s, Robert and Helen Lynd conducted a pioneering social science field study of Muncie, positioning the small city — known only pseudonymously in Middletown: A Study in Modern American Culture — as the archetypical American community where social change and cultural norms could be deeply investigated. The Lynds acted as cultural anthropologists, subjecting Muncie residents to surveys and interviews, delving into local newspaper stories and town statistics, and generally documenting life in Muncie along six axes: work, home, education, leisure, religion, and community.
I actually read Middletown as a freshman in college, and if I recall correctly, the Lynds’ primary finding was something like every generation thinks the next generation has gone to hell, but really it’s the same ol’ same ol’. Where 1920s Muncians feared radio would rip apart the town’s social fabric and that “kids these days” were wild and loose, later generations have trotted out the same complaints about TV, the internet, and misguided youth — and yet life goes on.
While the Middletown Studies were a landmark in sociological research (the Lynds published a follow-up in the 1930s), Sarah Igo of Vanderbilt University says Middletown also stands as ground zero for a concept we take for granted today: The average American. Igo, in The Averaged American: Surveys, Citizens, and the Making of a Mass Public, contends that opinion polls, community studies, consumer research, and the like — the stuff that supposedly describes Americans in an “empirical, detached and, most of all, objective” way — originated with Middletown, greatly influencing how Americans think of themselves, even creating the idea of doing so at all. The fixation on Muncie itself as the average American small city has perpetuated, with researchers, pollsters, and documentarians returning to “Middletown” to this day.
Despite school consolidations and reorganizations, the Muncie Central that lost to Milan in 1954 existed in the 1920s. A sophomore at the high school, years after the Lynds’ anthropological work, perhaps best captured what it could feel like to be so scrutinized: “I was, with many others merely irritated by the questionnaires we were expected accurately to reply to. It seemed to be nobody’s business how many times a week I took a bath or whether or not I ‘necked.’”
I only grabbed one snapshot while rolling into Muncie, this yard sale:
But the rural road from western Ohio into central Indiana featured a range of vistas: the scenic, the isolated, more Vast Lawns, a car accident (the first I’ve come across on my trip), and an Indiana sunset.
Ground covered since last post:
- Start: Bellefontaine, Ohio
- Jackson Center, Ohio
- New Bremen, Ohio
- St. Henry, Ohio
- Fort Recovery, Ohio
- Portland, Ind.
- Redkey, Ind.
- Albany, Ind.
- End: Muncie, Ind.
Trip to date:
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Jerkwater Is a Word That Means Something You Might Not Think It Means | Post 21 | Indiana
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It’s Important to Know Where America’s Shortest Street Is | Post 19 | Ohio
