In Indiana: A Resurrection from Desuetude

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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.