In Indiana: A Resurrection from Desuetude

By Gregory Jaynes

The postman arrives with a letter calling one's attention to the late George Ade, of Brook, Ind., 80 miles southeast of Chicago. Who? "He belongs in the historical category of Mark Twain," the letter informs, "and Will Rogers, whose philosophy was influenced by George Ade. His celebrous role deserves to be revivified." Did curiosity ever really kill a cat? To the telephone:

John R. Funk, a retired seed-corn executive and president of the George Ade Memorial Association, comes on the line with directions to the old Ade estate as if it blocks out more Indiana sky than a grain elevator. "Two miles east of Brook, on Indiana 16," he says, neglecting to say there is no interstate exit for Brook, nor for Highway 16, and not saying, too, that the signs at the town of Brook proclaim a population of 914 and a ban on peddlers and solicitors, but do not mention Ade. Found in the flesh, Funk, a courtly study in seersucker, points to a sign outside the manor and speaks of it as if to miss it is to overlook a whale.

"That sign cost us 2,000 bucks," he boasts. "It's guaranteed for a lifetime, although I don't know whose lifetime. The manufacturer says it's guaranteed against everything but a kid with a rifle." As if on cue, a flat, thwacking sound ends his sentence. It turns out to be the slamming of a golf ball on the golf course George Ade had built next to his house. On the other side of the house is a 63-bed hospital, whose construction George Ade suggested in his will, since everybody knows the only place you can find a doctor is on a golf course.

Fiddling with the door lock on the Tudor-style mansion, Funk says it will rain today. The countryside hums with farm machinery and insects. Inside, the house smells, the way old houses tend to, moist and rich, as if someone had enclosed a creek bottom. Late summer motes settle gently on the esoteric acquisitions of the once famous George Ade. Here a Grecian urn, there a Waterford crystal punch bowl that, when flicked crisply with a fingernail, keeps ringing clearly long after the flicker has left the room.

As the tour continues, Funk, 63 and silver-haired, allows that he never met Ade, who died in 1944, but that he used to sneak a nighttime swim in the Ade swimming pool. In the study, the guide explains that 20 years ago the only occupants of this house, where Will Rogers had slept and where two generations of old soldiers--Teddy Roosevelt and Douglas MacArthur among them--had come to pay respects, were raccoons and bees, them and the prairie winds. Ade had never married, and the house called Hazelden belonged to Newton County, a caretaker with more important fish to fry. Finally, in the course of raising funds to build the hospital, somebody suggested something be done about Hazelden. Enter the George Ade Memorial Association, formed in 1963, and 20 years and $100,000 later Hazelden has been brought back from desuetude. The association now desires a second restoration: George Ade's reputation.

The crusade is not unique. Nearly every county lays claim to historical figures famous and obscure. Colbert County, Ala. has Helen Keller; Gwinnett County, Ga., has Button Gwinnett (he signed the Declaration of Independence). The efforts share a commonness in that they are inevitably engineered by a knot of people who have the time on their hands to pursue funds while the county at large shies away from one more hungry charity. Where the Ade proposition differs from the rest is in its aim to bring a forgotten dead man back to prominence. On the other hand, it is like the rest in that it has a difficult time raising interest locally.

In George Ade's time, this was a section of the country where a portraitist might just as easily be commissioned for an oil painting of a prize bull as for a rendering of sweet Aunt Sara. Newton County has not changed that much, 117 years after Ade's birth. In his home, in fact, in a room given over to Newton County achievements, is a likeness of a much fancied four-footed sire. The point here is that Ade came from a patch where agrarian successes overshadow, even undermine, feats of the pen. (Ade's tool was a pen, an ignorant pilgrim finds.)

John Funk is at his best bringing the unlettered into the fold. As rain falls on Indiana, just as he predicted, he takes his leave for a personal restorative, a whisky. In the parting, he hands over a key to Ade's house, the admonition to read the fellow's papers gathered here, and the vow to make a television documentary on George Ade. That done, he will bring Ade's books back into print. A wet dirt smell is on the air.

The critic Jean Shepherd, research reveals, wrote in 1961 that he and S.J. Perelman were at one in the opinion that George Ade was "undoubtedly one of the greatest humorists, if not the most outstanding humorist, America has yet come up with." Shepherd noted sadly that Ade had been reduced to nothing more than a three-letter word meaning Indiana humorist in the Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle. Mark Twain once wrote that his admiration for Ade's work "has overflowed all limits, all frontiers." In turn, William Dean Howells' summation of Ade's craft: "His portrayal of life is almost absolute." Not to go hog-wild on this matter, however, it should be mentioned that H.L. Mencken checked in on the subject with typical Mencken tartness of tongue. He called Ade "a boor with a touch of genius."

In 1899 a book called Fables in Slang made Ade famous. More books followed, then plays. The Sultan of Sulu, The College Widow and The County Chairman gave him enough Broadway money to make him rich. He entertained sumptuously. To his brother, who griped about his wastrel spending, Ade said, "I never saw a pocket on a shroud." After dismissing his sibling's carping, Ade went on to give the biggest bash in Newton County history: 75 years ago this month, with 25,000 fried-chicken eaters attending, William Howard Taft launched his presidential campaign from Ade's front yard.

Somehow the written stuff just did not stand up beyond the '20s. Some said its Gay Nineties flippancy got lost in the Depression, but there are scholars who now maintain that many of the fables are as fresh today as they were on a faraway yesterday. Frequently cited is the "Fable of the Slim Girl Who Tried to Keep a Date That Was Never Made." It begins, "Once upon a time there was a slim girl with a forehead which was shiny and protuberant, like a Bartlett pear." It goes on to explain she was a woman of ideals and high moral purpose in a town too tiny for such values, and it ends, a scant 300 words later, with the disclosure that she finished out her years in penury with a man so backward he "believed everything he read in the Sunday papers." On the eve of his 75th birthday, Ade heard a Hoosier radio announcer wish him happy returns. He told a friend, "It's nice not to be forgotten." For the most part, he already was.

This time of year, late afternoon rain seems to paint a purple dusk over George Ade's village. Against such light, people scurrying home for supper were interrupted fleetingly and asked just what it was George Ade did. For every correct answer there was a wrong one, such as these:

"Some big farmer."

"A Chicago tycoon who came down here to relax."

And to think he had had seven plays on Broadway in three years! To Hollywood, George Ade had said, "I shall be glad to consider any insulting offer."

It is precisely this sort of wit, self-deprecating yet stinging, that causes, long after dark, a meddler in George Ade's affairs to draw up short from mourning the writer's lapse into nearly utter neglect. Further, an exploration of Ade's papers begets the notion that perhaps Ade himself would not appreciate John Funk & Co.'s fuss. It would appear he devoted the second half of his life to parties, travel, golf. He did not brood; he indulged himself. And in a short autobiography, after a perfunctory recitation of his literary triumphs, he chose to give equal time to a note that "under an alphabetical arrangement, my name was first on the list of those selected to direct the efforts of the Association for the Repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment." He seemed to be saying that championing the return of strong drink was as fine a thing as anything he had ever done. Having reached this warm conclusion, George Ade's latest guest found liquor in the pantry. --By Gregory Jaynes This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.