War Memorial Columbus, Indiana
We are out of synch, once again, putting Indiana before Mississippi, Tennessee and Kentucky, but this post is related to the day we honor service men and women who made the ultimate sacrifice for their country. We spent Veterans Day in Columbus, Indiana, a place like so many other places on this trip; we visited because someone said, “Hey, don’t miss this – you’ll love it there.” We took the advice and found a true treasure in Indiana.
To quote from the above link, Columbus is a town in Indiana that is a must-see mecca of mid-century modern design. Ordinarily I would use a link to give you the following information about J. Irwin Miller, the man who had the vision and means to bring world-class architects to his home town to create masterpieces of design. But it’s so essential to understanding how one person can make a huge difference, and also how taking this trip has made me feel better about the world, that I'm putting it into the blog (below). It’s essential reading:
Miller joined Cummins Engine Company, the family business, in 1934. He was executive vice president from 1944 to 1947, president from 1947 to 1951, and chairman from 1951 to 1977. He served as a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy in the South Pacific during the Second World War.
In 1950, Miller helped to establish the National Council of Churches (NCC) and later served as its first lay president (1960–63). Miller chaired the NCC's Commission on Religion and Race, which coordinated organized religion’s support for strong civil rights legislation, and jointly sponsored the March on Washington. He led religious delegations that met with Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson to push for the legislation that became the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
In 1954, he established the Cummins Foundation and in 1957 made an offer to Columbus that the foundation would pay all the architects fees for new public buildings in Columbus. Thus this small Midwestern city has buildings by Eero Saarinen, Eliel Saarinen, I.M. Pei, Kevin Roche, Richard Meier, Harry Weese, César Pelli, Gunnar Birkerts, and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, many of which feature extensive interiors designed by Alexander Girard. "Some people have a tombstone at the head of their gravesite or at the foot of it," Columbus resident William Beaver wrote. "Mr. Miller had the whole town as a monument." The American Institute of Architects in 1991 declared Columbus America's sixth most important city in terms of architecture. In addition to altruism, Miller used architecture to entice the best people to work for Cummins.[1]
Our visit to Columbus was one of the unexpected high points of our trip. We will come back to the many reasons why in a future post. I want to focus now on how we found comforting news where we didn't expect it, as well as a sober reminder that some things never change.
Comforting news (at least for me) appeared both on a local person''s car,
On signs in front and inside churches (this one, by the way, designed by Eero Saarinen):
And in things people told us.
Our docent leading one of the architectural tours we took mentioned that there was a push for Miller to run for president, but that was of no interest to him. “It’s such a shame,” she said. “He would have made such a wonderful president. So much better than…” and then she caught herself and said, “So much better than many other presidents we’ve had.” At the end of the tour she told us not to miss the town's Veterans Memorial.
It was a blustery cold day - the first real cold one we've had. We hugged our coats tight around us as we approached the memorial's cluster of tall pillars. There had been a Veterans Day service there that morning and the red, white and blue wreaths remained at the entrance.
The surface on the outer pillars, clad in Indiana limestone, is rough hewn with craggy vertical lines that draw your eye upward toward the sky. Walking among the inner pillars, with their smooth surfaces, you feel a calm quiet. Even though the structure is open, you know you have entered into a sanctuary. The inner pillars are etched with the names of women and men from Columbus who died in the two World Wars, Korea, Viet Nam and the Gulf wars. Interspersed with the etched names are letters that the families back home received from battle fronts and hospitals, sent by soldiers, sailors, and airmen and women who never came home. The impact is devastating. You are reading, in most cases, the last communication these families ever received from their sons, daughters, fathers, mothers, husbands, wives and grandchildren. Some of the letters were sent the day before the author's death. To me, each name and letter was a sobering reminder that war is never over.
Below are links to videos I made of some of the other letters on the pillars.
Video 1 Video 2 Video 3 Video 4
Maryann Thompson, a Cambridge, MA architect designed the memorial. The link will take you to an interview she did about it.