I grew up in a small farming community in southeast Indiana, born near the end of the Great Depression,  old enough to understand the Big War and a so-called child of the ’50s.
     Our county was small with a population of less than 25,000 consisting of a county seat and seven satellite towns.  Each town had its own Mom and Pop grocery stores, a hardware and feed store, a church, a gas station/auto repair shop, two taverns a pool hall, a Post Office, a fire house, an abandoned bank (closed since 1929) and a school house for grades one through 12.
     The town nearest to which I lived stood out somewhat by also having a one-cell jail–the Town Marshall would leave his house from time to time to check on the welfare of any prisoner.  The gentleman who erected the concrete block structure with one barred window and a steel door was also the first official occupant, having spread the proceeds of his wages among the two aforementioned beer halls.
     The “fire department” was a bit of a joke as well.  There was only one truck…a refurbished WWII fuel tanker with a ladder wired on to it.  It was sufficient since there was only one designated fireman…a school bus driver and part-time farmer.  The predominant story that circulated at the time was that if a nearby house caught on fire it would quickly burn, but the fire department could keep it burning all night long.
     One significant demografic about our little county made it stand out from most of the rest.  The population was 100 percent white.  While Indiana could not be considered a part of the deep south at that time, residents in the 1950s liked it that way.
     I was six years old before I laid eyes upon  a person of color.  Dad and I were taking my mother to the Carew Tower in Cincinnati , the nearest cancer treatment center, and there he was in the middle of an intersection–a policeman directing traffic.  I recall making an audible comment as we passed by and my mother placing her index finger to her lips to silence me.
     Being an all white community the only folks we had to discriminate against were Catholics…and we were good at it.  Our church was basically fundamentalist in nature and we, of course, were the true Christians.  I never did believe, however, the stories that nuns ate their babies but we were mean-spirited except when graduation day came around.   The Parochial School only went through eight grades and the boys were really good basketball players.  The only hope our high school had of winning a county championship was for Catholic eighth graders to matriculate to our Freshman class.  I dated a couple of their girls but anything more was out of the question–marrying a Catholic was a mixed marriage.
     Black over-the-road truck drivers were served at the truck stop out on the highway but by and large there was no welcome mat.  From time to time the sheriff would escort a black transient to the county line–north toward Indianapolis.  Once our school principal picked up a young black hitchhiker in his brand new 1950 Chevy.  When his wife learned of it, she hosed the car down–inside and out.
     Prejudices in those days were not limited to those with black skins.  In 1945 a soldier returned home with a war bride after seeing action overseas.  She was a beautiful full-blooded Hawaiian girl but the problem was, she looked Japanese.  Grocers would not sell them food, service stations wouldn’t pump their gas, they were shunned at church.  They had no choice but to pack up and move to the city where such bias either did not exist or was tolerated.
     Back in the 1950s we believed Negro was the polite term for a person of color.  Thats not what we used if the situation ever arose, which it rarely did.  At Christmas, I would receive a stocking filled  with an orange, an apple, some English walnuts and some dark, hard-shelled nuts we called nigger toes.  At the movies on Saturday afternoons if you didn’t want popcorn among the candy choices was a box of Nigger Babies.
     The “n” word, no longer acceptable today, was in common usage where I grew up and it was the younger generation that had to teach the oldsters how the world is trying to change.
     Today, things are different.  Two generations of slow but sure progress has come to my home county.  A huge auto manufacturing plant employing thousands of workers recently opened bringing a diversified workforce.  The county is no longer all white.  The schools are becoming integrated.  The basketball teams are improving.