Digital Indy

#tbt 1929 Shortridge High School athletics.  In Tennis: “Agnes [Hinkle], will defend her title  in the Spring tournament.” She would indeed keep her title, winning three tournaments before she graduated from Shortridge in 1932.

Casper, making ghosts less spooky since 1945. 

Victorian-inspired fall craft idea: a wreath made from seeds and pits!

Staff member Margaret Anne Paul at the Indianapolis Public Library with a banned books display in 1941. 

The Indiana State Fair is now well under way. This year’s festivities are part of the Indiana Bicentennial celebration, so it is definitely not one to miss!

Indianapolis is hosting GenCon for another year, and in honor of the best four days of gaming, we’ll be posting games from our Children’s Museum of Indianapolis Collection.  Today we have the Speedway Motor Race game from the 1930s. The toy’s maker boasted that it was “designed to furnish all the excitement and skill of an actual automobile race.” Players selected their cars- Fiat, Stutz, Pierce-Arrow, Cadillac,Packard or Locomobile and jockeyed for pole position. Carl Fisher, along with 3 business partners, built a "motor parkway" in Speedway, Indiana in 1909 to test automobiles. Central Indiana was quickly becoming a dominant force in automobile manufacturing with dozens of companies like Marmon, Cole, Stutzand Duesenberg using the facility to test cars. Out of this competitive spirit, automobile racing exhibitions began in 1910. A year later in 1911, the first Indianapolis 500 was held on Memorial Day. Spectators came by train from as far away as Chicago, Cleveland, Cincinnati, St. Louis, and even New York ! Forty cars participated with average speeds of at least 75 miles per hour.

In 1957, the Lionel Corporation toy manufacturing company introduced its "girl" train set. The set flopped, a failure that has been attributed to children's desire to own realistic-looking train sets, regardless of their gender. The set is now quite rare.

We recently added a photograph of Shirley Chisholm to our Indypl African American History Committee collection and it couldn't have come at a more fitting time. The first African American woman to be elected to Congress, in 1972 Chisholm also became the first woman to make a bid for the Democratic presidential nomination. Still "unbought and unbossed," in 1986 she gave a lecture for the African American History Committee at the St. Peter Claver Center.