Everyday Life in Middletown
Summer directive, 2025
What identity or identities are important to you?? These might include race, class, ethnicity, and/or gender/sexuality, but they may also include others (Job-related? Familial? Related to hobbies or enthusiasms? Religious? Political? Other?)?
Is Muncie congenial to or accepting of my “identities?” I would say that it is, but I’m a pretty conformist white guy aside from one key area I’ve discussed before and will probably get into again.
That said, I do feel Munsonians have a place in their hearts for the quirky and the misfits, if they have gotten to know them and regard them as non-threatening. Societal “oddballs” are thought to be ok, but raffish, antisocial “characters” are conversely not.
This divide works both ways, in the conventional “haves” punching down on the “have-nots,” and the perpetually outcast resentful of the better-regarded. Once again, “Middletown” is typical of American society.
Human nature is to label things, and I don’t think we’re any different around here. The Muncie I grew up in is different from that of today. I will date myself here, but the Muncie of my early-childhood that supported three high schools and numerous feeder elementary and middle schools is long gone. Even the gritty, but prosperously industrial Muncie must have looked like a gleaming metropolis when my parents moved in from small-town USA in the late 60’s.
It may not have always seemed like it within the bubble I resided, but my early family years would be considered upwardly mobile by most standards. One car became two, we moved to a bigger house in an older, more established neighborhood. My grade school classes were filled with kids who looked like me (except for the girls, ha) and came from two-parent nuclear families like mine. I was a bit of an odd duck in that I had no siblings. My friends all went on vacations and made Christmas lists from the Sears catalog. The Boomer generation (which my parents fall just outside) was establishing itself. Conformity, at least socially, was important.
I was naïve to it at the time, but there was very much a mindset of exceptionalism within this corner of Muncie. Families I knew were of management or at least professional class, and things like poverty, divorce, and domestic abuse were thought of as things that happened in “other” homes. My parents, who knew better, would often just say we were “lucky.”
I would soon learn that Muncie was not Mayfield for everyone.
Junior high brought more diversity in my classmates, both racially and economically. These were my first experiences with kids who might not have a coat to wear or enough food to eat… these absences would later devolve to things like “no parent in the home,” or “no running water,” but not until almost adulthood as Muncie’s economic realities began to teeter. It was also the first time that my perceptions of a “typical” upbringing were labeled “rich,” or “white.”
I learned that not all of Muncie and the surrounding area was so aspirational. At the time I graduated from high school, it seemed the counselors were still dealing with more students who took factory jobs or enlisted in the military after graduation, rather than moving on to college, and far fewer left home for their post-secondary education.
Like some others I have known, I left for college elsewhere – mainly because it wasn’t home, though that shouldn’t be perceived as a knock on BSU or even Muncie. Both were simply too familiar. Even though it often seemed Muncie’s best days were behind it, I have since returned twice, for both family and professional reasons. I’ve noticed in addition to “two Muncie’s” as noted by this project, it seems like there are also competing “Old Muncie’s,” ones that romanticize better days, whether through steady factory work and a healthy middle class, or the more well-to-do, which then as now considers modern Muncie to be unique and exceptional, yet can still travel comfortably to Indianapolis or other cities for entertainment or shopping and educate their children elsewhere. Others reside elsewhere and travel into Muncie only for work and return home in the evenings, taking their earnings with them. To those who feel stuck, seem more likely to find Muncie lacking.
Maybe it’s exceptionalism, maybe it’s those better days, or maybe it’s the prominence of the Middletown Studies, but there seems to be a yearning in Muncie that we’re still a “special” place. Typical, yet unique. To me it seems there is still a desire to paper over Muncie’s rough spots, pretend they’re not serious social issues, or simply deny them. What I do know from past experience is we can’t address a problem or make changes until we acknowledge it exists. Was Muncie’s nostalgia always “great,” or are they memories of another kind of “great” seen in the retroactive politics of today that people yearn, back when we largely thought, worshipped, ate, played, loved and looked the same?
How has the experience been for you? What have you gotten out of it? Has keeping diaries (and answering directives) changed your sense of everyday life? Of Muncie? Of anything else??
“Everyday Life in Middletown,” has been an enjoyable experience.. one that’s allowed me to self-reflect, think back on memories good and bad, and hopefully, be an honest assessor of our local culture. Somehow, I’ve felt alternately at times that I’d either shared too much, or not enough. Maybe that’s a “typical” feeling among all of us.