While I was at Ball State, I didn’t exactly fall in love with Muncie, but I developed a fondness for the city and its problems that’s difficult to explain.
Muncie was a city built on the manufacturing industry, and it was spared somewhat from the Great Depression, owing largely to the Ball brothers and their famous jars. However, in the last decade to decade and a half, manufacturing has packed up and moved out of town.
East Central Indiana’s standby auto factories have been gone longer than I’ve been able to drive. The city is not weathering this economic downturn nearly as well as it did the Depression.
"downtown" by the Spacebase on Flickr.
And frankly, that’s as far as I want to prepare you for “Hard Times in Middletown,” a special about Muncie produced by Marketplace and American RadioWorks.
It’s a great short series about the town – focusing almost entirely on people outside of the Ball State University bubble, and it’s a sharp contrast. Spending my life on or nearby campus, I saw economic struggles, but it was always the economic struggle of the college student needing to decide between another beer or a burrito.
The people they focus on are actual community members, and you get the sense, through the production, that the audio was recorded in the forced closeness of a Muncie winter.
My only complaint about “Hard Times in Middletown” is the same one that you can guess Kerry would have – Kai Ryssdal. It just seems that, when he visited Muncie, Ryssdal would have been less likely to hang out and drink with townies – the subject of the special – at the Heorot, the Fickle Peach, or the Thirsty Turtle, and more likely to pal around over Cosmopolitans with his fellow big foreheaded, hair slicked back, finger-gun-rights activist Miles at the douchebaggy, if tasty and reasonably priced martini bar just off campus.
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