Campbell_Bob_Transcription

Description:	Interview with Mayor Bob CampbellDate: 1982Interviewer: B. J. GoodwinTranscriber: Dixie TaylorB. J. Lifetime resident. Local movie entrepreneur. Interview is by B. J. Goodwin. Bob in the interest of public record is it agreeable with you that this tape be put on file in the Lebanon Public Library for use of the public now and in the future?Bob: Very true, very true. You may interview me for as long as you like. It’s quite a compliment that you would ask me to be interviewed.B. J.: I hope someone is listening to it 50 years from now.Bob: Well, I do too. I hope my grandchildren will enjoy it as well as most of the kids that I helped in the community. I think about all the kids in Lebanon know me, over the years that I’ve been in the business that I’ve been associated with over the last 45 years. Being as you said a Lebanon native; I was born in Lebanon in 1918. I was born over on East North Street near the brick building that Dr. Honan now has for where he makes glasses., there on East North Street. I think the first house from the old Dr. Higgins property on East North and I was born there. My father had been in business in Kirklin for several years and my mother had moved back to Lebanon and after I was born, my mother did not like to stay in Lebanon and she decided that they would move back to Kirklin which my father did. Went back there and my mother passed away in 1924 and I think it was about 1928 or ‘29 and we more or less migrated back to Lebanon by the way of a couple of three farms in Boone County, coming back into Lebanon. And I went to school here. I graduated from high school here in 1937. I was a victim of one of the things in school which back in those days you had 7A and & 7B and I was in the 8th grade when I moved to town but I got put back in 7A. I think maybe in some of the activities in school, I probably didn’t apply myself as much as I should and I think a couple of three subjects, I did not get the proper grades in and had to retake them over. And I had many, many a fine old schoolteacher, you know. As a matter of fact, when we first moved back into Lebanon, we were a neighbor of yours. We lived at 919 N. Lebanon Street and your father lived across on the corner of Esplanade and N. Lebanon and Chris Pever lived across the street from us, who was later on in the clothing store business here in Lebanon. During high school in 1930 after we first lived on the north side of Lebanon, we moved to the south side and was more or less grew up down there until I was out of high school. During my high school education, I worked at what was known as the Chambers Hardware in Lebanon in the north side of the square. I worked there which has quite a history to it. Mr. Chambers, E. F. Chambers, he was the father of the Chambers, Burl and Floyd and grandfather of Richard and Ron Chambers that was in business there. I worked for them all during high school. The Chambers had a son that was my age that died while we were in high school, Russell, and he was in my class I believe and, maybe your class at school. He died from a basketball injury if I remember right, he injured his leg playing basketball and he lost a leg and he passed away.B. J. Actually, it was bone cancer, wasn’t it?Bob: Was it?B. J. I think.Bob Maybe before we know too much about that back in the thirties. But Russell was my age and I worked at that hardware store all through high school and also through until 1937. I left there in 1937 and went to work at the Avon Theater which was formerly the old Colonial Theater. I’ve been there more or less ever since. Lebanon, to me, is a lot of history. I feel like being a part of it and as I go back and look around the square, I want to say that I was raised on the corner of North Lebanon and North Streets. I grew up there on that corner and worked in what is now Mount’s Flower Shop as a Standard gasoline station. I worked there when we still had the old pumps that you pumped up and had the five gallon on top or ten gallon, whatever it was.B. J. And gas was about 15 cents a gallon.Bob A dollar’s worth of gas would run you for a week and Sunday was the day to shop for gasoline because everybody brought their car in on Sunday and filled it with gas. That was after church, all the people in town would bring their car in town and fill it up with gas and go out for a Sunday drive and they wouldn’t be back until next Sunday. And a dollar’s worth of gas then would run you for a week. As you said, it was 15 cents a gallon. A quart of oil was a dime, I think. And it was in a bottle and you pumped it out of a 50 gallon can and put it in a bottle and poured it in the cars. I was getting, when I worked at the hardware store, I went into the store of a morning about 7 am and opened up and ran to school about a quarter of eight. I got back at 4 pm and worked until 6 pm and on Saturday all day and I got three dollars and a half a week. Which was big money then, in those days. And I was real important because I had a key to the store. I felt like I was really something. B. J., one of the things I enjoy when I look around as I many times do when I come downtown in the daytime, I’ll walk around the town downtown area is just reminiscing in some of the paintings we’ve had. Mrs. Denger had painted several different scenes of the square at different times. When the Starlite, where Herschell Appliances is now and when we were kids, it was the old Adler Building and it was called the Cason-Neal building, I believe.B. J. Now wait a minute, the Cason-Neal building was next to it, wasn’t it?Bob No, it was the same building. It was the same building. And Adlers had the whole corner. They had from the corner of Lebanon Street to the alley and then right in the middle of it was the rotunda area which you went up there to the Red Men’s lodge, offices were upstairs and there were some living quarters up there. In the middle of the area was a Smith’s Barber Shop. If you can remember, there was an old gentleman by the name of Smith, he had a barber shop there and he was the grandfather of a boy that I went to school with, Ralph Huse. And they lived, at the time, where the house is now that Dr. Porter moved in on North Street. That big old house that’s right behind your husband’s grandparents, the Titus property which is on the corner.B. J. You don’t mean Dr. Porter, you mean Richard.Bob Yeah, Richard Porter moved his house right in back of there and that’s where the Huses used to live. As I reminisce and go back you know, we start around the square there and there that was a big thing back when I was a kid. The Boone County square. Saturday night was a big night. And we started around that square and people walked from the time, well they would come in town on Saturday afternoon and spent the whole afternoon and evening in Lebanon right downtown. Parked their cars on the square and sit in their cars and watch the people go by and visited, women done their shopping. As we went around the square we could start out where Herschell’s was and we’d come around with the Adlers which was the biggest department store in this part of the country. Then the Chambers Hardware was next door to them when I was a kid but before that we’d go on around and we’d come around where the Lewis-Storm, where Donaldson attorneys’ offices are now, and the old Lewis-Storm Grocery was there for years and years where all the farmers would come in and done their shopping and trading and so forth there, before all of our big chain stores got into our city, our community. And there was a five and ten cent store which was the Scott’s, the Long’s Bakery over on the east side of the square. And many people don’t remember but the J. C. Penney’s store was where the M. J.’s Flower Shop is now. And where the sports store is was the Miller Jones, when I was a kid, the Miller Jones Shoe Store. Which was a discount shoe house. You could buy shoes for $1.99 a pair. We were lucky then to have a pair of shoes, because if we got a pair of shoes in the fall to go to school with, we had to wear it till teacher’s institute, so we could take ‘em in and have them repaired when the teachers institute in October. Then as we went on around the square, many people don’t remember that but there was a jewelry store over on the east side of the square, which was the Harry McDaniel’s Jewelry store, which is next to the Long Drug Store, which is now the Greek Pizza Parlor. Then when before my time and it happened well, when I was rather small but I wasn’t living in Lebanon, where the Heflin Building is now was the Farmers Bank and it burnt out and wasn’t there. But back again it was a hardware store at one time on the east side of the square which was the Union Hardware. That’s where the Charlie Staton Meat Market was at. The Charlie Staton Meat Market was right on the corner of the alley which is part of the Scotts building now. My father worked there as a meat cutter. And we come on down and where the Sears store is now, if you remember, was the Hooten and Davis Hardware store. That was in there, then years after that changed and it was an automobile dealership there and various things. Then the City Garage was where the Presbyterian Annex Church is now. The City Garage, what is not really the City Garage, but the name of the firm. The city building was right where the parking lot is next to Sears. So go on around the square you know. One of the big deals then was______Candy Shop, right where the Adler’s store is now. When I was a young man that’s when our stores began to come around. It was a restaurant right next door approximately where Red Apple is now. Then you’d have the Kroger first store was on the square, and then you went on down and there was a clothing store, Mr. Conner and Mr. Davis had a clothing store there for years. And then there was Gray McCord Meat Market where the Sweet Shoppe is now. And the A&P Grocery was on the square next to where the music shop is now, D&R Music. That was the first A&P store. And we had the Smokehouse Pool Room, that’s where the Brunt’s is and the Crooks and Jones Clothing Store and the Mitchell and Berry Drug Store which a lot of the kids today remember when it was on the south side of the square in the bank. And then over where the big parking lot is of the banks is what was commonly known as when we were kids, the Bowery. But the Citizen’s Bank was on the corner then the Perkins Clothing store was the next store and from there to south street until you got to the old Lido theater what is now the Smokehouse Pool Room. The Olympic Theater as we knew it in them days, which was in those days 10 cents a show and there was the Bowery with all the taverns on 32 when all the taverns came back in there along on South Lebanon Street. Before that was one of the first businesses that turned into a tavern, was a man that had a confectionery and a hangout for the kids was John Hubert Candy Shop. Which is on South Lebanon Street, which is where, a lady who is still living in our city, Mag Edens, it was her father, which was a high school hangout at those times in the early 30’s for the kids. Then when prohibition and the 32 ________ and so forth came back, several taverns opened up in that area, and that’s what was called the Bowery because they were all so close together. Then on the west side of the square, we have a lot of history there. We have the old, where the Union Federal Building is now, we had a couple of shoe stores. We had one shoe store right next to it, where the, I believe, it’s part of the bank now, part of the Union Federal Building. Where the Hall & Frank Jewelry is where the Rural loan Association was when I was a kid. I remember a gentleman by the name of Harvey New was the head of that. And then right on next to it where Charlie Jones now has his office building was John Adams Harness Shop. I don’t know whether you remember that or not B. J. Then there was Charlie Morgan’s Shoe Store was part of what is now Cowan’s Cubbard. And then the Ackerman Drug Store was next to it. I mean the Oak Drug Store when we were kids. It was the Oak Drug Store, then right next to the Oak Drug Store was Charlie Morgan’s shoe store, then John Adams Harness Shop, which later became the Boone County Market. Mr. and Mrs. _________Thompson bought out a grocery, the old Hutchins store and moved it up there on the square and called it the Boone County Market. Then we had the famous Wheeler’s restaurant which was over on the west side of the square which was another place that was 24 hours a day. It was quite a restaurant because it was known all over the state. Mr. Wheeler had restaurants in Lebanon, Frankfort and Logansport and Lafayette. And his brother, Bill, had restaurants in Indianapolis and Richmond and carried the same name and the same slogan. I’ll remember it as long as I live. “Its not what you eat but pay attention more to where you eat it.” That was their motto. I remember we could get an Aristocrat sandwich and a milk shake in there for about 50 cents. That was quite a deal if you had 50 cents in those days and go up there and get a big Aristocrat which is equal to a big Burger Chef today. Then where the Mitchell and Berry Drug Store is now in 1982, was the old Star Drug store, owned by a gentleman who was quite a family in this city, was the Wimboroughs. George Wimborough ran that and it was called the Star Drug Store. And then we went right next door and that was the Hall and Frank when I was a kid. And then we do on down and on the corner where the Boone County Hardware is now, was the ……B. J. Eichman’sBob Yes, Eichman’s. Yea, two stores there, double store. One of the finest ladies’ ready to wear stores in the whole state of Indiana. They come from all over this community and the territory to buy their dresses and so on. Mr. Eichman, Isadore Eichman, who was a very fine man in the community. He owned the building where the Myers Hotel was, where now it’s what we call the County Seat Restaurant. That was a hotel then and in 1937, it burned out, they renovated it and Mr. Vern Myers ran a hotel there for years as a hotelier. And then as I said, I had been affiliated with the theaters. In 1937, I went to work for John R. Alexander and Frank Carey with the firm’s name Carey and Alexander yet today. They came here in 1924 and started in the theater business. I can remember and I’m sure you can, we always had, I think when I first came to work for them, I think admission was 15 cents for kids and 25 cents for adults. And I think we went to 33 cents and then we had what we called “pal night” on Thursday night, 2 for a quarter.B. J. And you gave away dishes too.Bob Yeah, they had dish night, they gave away dishes and then at the old theater down on South Lebanon Street, which was the Olympic, which I was telling about later which was next to the Bowery, they had a 10-cent night, serials, serial then was once a week.B. J. And an old man with a popcorn machine.Bob Yes, Mr. John Bohannon. And my company that I am with now today passed up a million dollars probably in the movie business because they didn’t sell popcorn in theaters until 1947, that’s when we started selling popcorn. There was a gentleman, as you said, Mr. John Bohannon, was from an old family in Lebanon, had the popcorn stand out in front of the Lido Theater, which was the Olympic at one time.B. J. Showed mostly cowboy movies.Bob That’s right. He sold popcorn for a nickel a bag. And next door to it was John Cason, if you remember. It was a little novelty store and candy store where I remember we could go buy candy with a _____ laying on it. We always kidded about that. But anyway, there was another store we left out that was on South Lebanon Street, which was just the other side of the Perkins Jewelry, was Abby Garner. Remember that? The Citizens Bank sat on the corner, then there was the Perkins clothing store, then there was the Abby Garner’s which later became the Pastime pool room, I think and so forth. But anyway, that was in the early 30’s and then during the 30’s and in the 40’s we began to, I think it was ’43, wasn’t right after ’43 when the People’s Bank Building burnt there on the corner by the Adler building burnt in ’43 or ’44?B. J. ’44.Bob Yeah. But anyway, that was World War II coming on. But we of course, I’m sure a lot of people don’t remember the things here on Main Street that we had. Course, Main Street used to be quite a deal. 52, old US 52 went right through our town and when you come from Indianapolis, you go clear through Lebanon to get to Lafayette. There was no interstate, no bypasses. Bypasses came in the late 40’s, early 50’s. But that was quite a major artery. A lot of major businesses were established on Main Street, Indianapolis Avenue, Lafayette Avenue. Every other corner was a service station, if I remember right. We had a lot of them on Main Street and a lot of traffic, cause all the big trucks and everything. Even before they got concrete highways, old 52 wasn’t always concrete. I guess in the early ‘20’s or middle ‘20’s when they concreted old 52. It went by what we now call the old County Farm which is at the southeast end of the city. And that is where the old 52 route went out to Indianapolis. Another thing B. J., I wouldn’t want to point out, maybe go back here and reminisce, we had a lot of famous people from our city. A lot of people who were outstanding citizens. You know that Sam Ralston, ________, Ivory Tolle. We’ve had a lot of various well-educated people like Herman Wells is from our city who was president of Indiana University and Chancellor now of Indiana University. He was a native of Lebanon and his folks were too. As your father was an attorney, we had a lot of well educated and well, famous attorneys in our city. Matter of fact, some of them have been, I think, mayors of our city at one time or another. Maybe, I’m not sure, I can’t go right back, but I remember one who made an attempt, when I was a young man, to run for governor of the state of Indiana, _____ Rogers, he was a famous attorney in our city. We’ve had our legends; we’ve had a lot of great people and great families. To me, Lebanon’s a lot of history. I don’t know, sometimes I get to reminiscing a lot of people I’ve known over the years, even since I’ve been mayor that I get back and people don’t realize that maybe I get to reminiscing about things that’s not interesting to them but is just to me and I know it is to you because of the fact that you’ve grown up here and everything, your husband and so forth. Matter of fact, him being an attorney, I went to school with Jim and used to argue. We had a teacher, by the name of Lydia Bell who used to set Jim and I up in arguments in school which I know he had much more of an education than I in his attorney bit. He’s quite a guy. Today I’ve had a few arguments with him since he’s been an attorney, but he’s still great. I think the people that have stayed in our town, we’ve had people that have made this their home. It’s the legend that’s behind it, is the people that make it, the people that have lived here, I say grass roots here. I’m very fortunate and I know that you have been too, that my family has stayed here and will make it their home and I’m sure that they’ll have things to hand down to the next generation of people. So many things I could talk about B. J., if you ask me a question, maybe I can remember something.B. J. Alright, I have a couple of questions.Bob Okay.B. J. You’ve been mayor now for 4 terms.Bob Uh-huhB. J. You are about halfway through your 4th term?Bob That’s right. I’ve got a little over a year and a half to go.B. J. And you have succeeded….Bob Mayor Herb Ransdall B. J. You were elected as a Democrat in, at that time as I recall, a predominantly Republican town.Bob Still is, still is B. J. It still is a heavily Republican town. My success is the people elect you and I don’t play the party game. I’m a fella who tries to serve the people, as well as my predecessor, who was Mayor Ransdall, Herb Ransdall. I was in his Council for 4 years.B. J. He was a Republican.Bob He was a Republican. He was a 3-time mayor but he did not have three terms in a row. I’m the first mayor that ever succeeded myself making a third term and naturally broke the record for the 4th term, which, to me, is quite a complement. As a man, I sometimes make a joking remark that they’ll leave me there till I do it right. It makes you feel rather good when you walk down the streets of your town and the kids call you Mayor Bob. Your kids, of course, and my kids growed up here. Just the other day, a gentleman asked me, he said, “Bob, my kid graduated from high school this past year and he wanted to know who was mayor before Mayor Bob”. It made me realize I’d been in here over 12 years and his son went through school and didn’t know anyone else had been mayor of the city but Mayor Bob. Herb Ransdall, who I attribute a lot of my success to because as a Councilman, I was the only Democrat in Herb Ransdall’s Council. Mayor Ransdall was a good friend, matter of fact, a relative. You’ve heard it said before my father and Mayor Ransdall were first cousins.B. J. I didn’t know that.Bob Yes, his mother was a Camp and his mother was a sister to my grandfather Campbell and that made Herb and I second cousins. Of course, he and I were very close friends, he was a great mayor. He done a lot for the city of Lebanon. I feel like maybe as the history goes B. J., the Campbells have more or less, had quite an effect on the history of Lebanon because even along with Mayor Ransdall, with his mother being a Campbell, I had an uncle who served on the city council for two terms and Uncle Tom, Thomas Campbell, who was in __________here in Lebanon and still has his daughters and sons here. Doreen Horning and also, Milford Campbell. I guess down the line there were some distant relatives in the city administration and in politics. As I say and you asked that, I owe my success to, I think it’s the people I serve and the people that work for me, in the administration that I have. I think that you’re no better than the people you have with you, that make you a success. I think all the people I have with me that work with me in my administration, I would say, are waiting for me to be successful and the people believe in me.B. J. For example?Bob Well for instance, I have good department heads. I have people in various departments in the city. I have people who help in planning, helping the city growing, that have had confidence in me and I have confidence in them and not interfered with them in anyway and let them be the people who have done their work. You take in my capacity as mayor, I have to have a lot of good advisors. I have a gentleman who has been a city attorney for me for 3 terms. He’s a very fine man. Your husband, for instance, is my Zoning Board Chairman and served on the committee. They serve on the committee and they’ve real fine work with him. With the kind of community, you’ve got and the friendly people you have, that’s what makes a success.B.J. What do you think, over your 4 terms has been the biggest headache you’ve had? Snow?Bob Well yeah besides the snow…I’ll tell you, really, truthfully, I don’t know as you’d say anything big item has been a big headache. I think, we gotta enjoy it, you gotta do your work, you gotta enjoy what you do. It’s like you spent many years as a schoolteacher. If you didn’t enjoy it, you couldn’t do it. Well, I know I carry a lot of my problems home with me and I have a very understanding wife and so forth. But the big problems you have and I look at it this way B. J., the problems I have as mayor of the city are not only my problems, they’re everybody’s problems. We got to solve it together. We, more or less, have to solve it together. It’s like, as you say, this being the year of ’82, we had a lot of snow. Well, you got to have some leadership, you gotta have some people that does the job for you. I feel like I can’t take the glory of being the greatest mayor in snow removal there is but I’ve had a history of having good departments that done the job for me and keeps at it. The headaches you get is the complaints you get from the people that don’t understand.B. J. Instant miracles?Bob That’s right. I think we have today, and I think you found this out in your career as a teacher, that many people expecting too much from society. I think that today, and I feel like this, and I ‘m not a non-believer in Little League baseball, I’m not a non-believer in student participation things, but I think today we have made it too easy on our kids. We’re depending on somebody else to take care of our kids. We’re depending on somebody else to take care of our kids. We’re depending on Boys Club, we’re depending on ….B. J. Schools.Bob Schools, we’re depending on the Little Leagues. It isn’t like it was when I was a kid. We went out and chose up a baseball team every afternoon. We played baseball every afternoon. We didn’t have a new baseball, we didn’t have a new glove, we didn’t have shoes, we didn’t have uniforms. Maybe we got an old paint cap or something like that, we more or less done our own. But today, and don’t get me wrong, I’m not downgrading, it’s just the fact that I think sometimes, if our kids, my grandkids and so forth, had to go out and make it and prepare their selves, make their own way in playing and so forth. You don’t see it like we did when we were kids. You don’t see kids shooting basketball in the alley, you don’t see ‘em out on a vacant lot playing baseball.B. J. There aren’t very many vacant lots for them.Bob Well, that’s true, but you don’t see ‘em out playing in the daytime, they gotta play under the lights, they gotta play when Grandma and Grandpa can come see ‘em or the manager picks them up or something like that. We don’t…hey I don’t say…98% of our kids today are good kids. We can holler about our dope situation; we can holler about our alcohol situation. Yes, we have them, we are always going to have them. We had ‘em when we were kids. But there’s more kids.B. J. I don’t think we had drugs.Bob No, but we had alcohol, but there’s more kids today. We didn’t have as many automobiles as when we were kids. If one kid had an automobile, boy, that was great! And a lot of times, we all chipped in to buy 5 gallons worth of gas or a $1 worth of gas so we could go to Indianapolis to see a big-name band or things like that. But we gotta face those things. We gotta make these people understand and maybe…as I said, they expect too much. We spoil ‘em to the fact, they expect the street to be completely dry. When they leave the house of a morning, and get out in that car, they expect the street to be clean of snow, even if it snowed all night. They expect it not to be slick. Because it shouldn’t be slick, but after all when you and I were kids there would be snow on the streets from maybe December to the middle of April or maybe into May, because it hadn’t been cleaned or it hadn’t thawed out. When the old Interurban Lines went through, I can remember when the Interurban Lines went right down the middle of Lebanon Street, I can remember snow and stuff down there, they took them up, in the middle of the street. I can remember Vinegar Hill, as we call it, many times over on West Street, at the top of West Street and Baronne. I can remember when that had ice and snow on it all winter. But nowadays I can’t leave ice and snow on there because a guy can’t get up that hill, he’s gotta have it cleaned off. Jim Goodwin, Bob Campbell, maybe everybody else, more or less, I guess we expect that or I think sometimes we expect too much.B. J. And don’t you think too, with young people, that they aren’t learning to take responsibility?Bob Impatience is very…and younger… as I say, we are taking it away from them. We’re trying to say, hey let’s make it easy for them. We don’t want them to do what we had to do. And you know and I know that we have to…today, I’ve said this many, many times, a person who has raised their family, got ‘em out on their own and they’re on their own, we all know, many of them have very many disappointments. But I think some of them…I’ve always said this, I’ve said this to many people who come into my office for various things, counseling and things like that, they deserve a medal. Because they’ve done the job that many people have not been fortunate, not been able to do. Not because they’re not good people, it’s just been the things that’s happened and they couldn’t have done it. We got more kids today, getting back again to the fact we are trying to do too much, society tries to do too much for them.B. J. What do you think is going to be the future of Lebanon? Are we going to be a bedroom community of Indianapolis?Bob No, I really think we’re going to be setting out here and we’re going to be just like we always have. I think that your kids, my kids, love this community and they are going to keep it a community. I don’t think Indianapolis is going to come out here and swallow us. We got to have farms and we’ve got the greatest farming community there is. I think someday and I’m sure it will be in the near future; we will go into a program where the building and so forth cannot merge which we kind of been watching that in the Boone County Planning and so forth and take all of our farmland and make it into housing. We have an area say in the southeast section of Boone County, which is a big urban area near Indianapolis, the Zionsville area. I don’t think that Lebanon will ever grow out like that. I think we got too much good farmland in this community that we will have…we will be a farm community; I think we shall stay that way. I think the progress that we have…it’s going to be slow like we’ve done in the past, since I’ve been mayor, very slow. We’ve done it in a manner that has not hurt us.B. J. No, it has surprised me really. I thought, all of a sudden, we’d be swamped.Bob Well, we have done a very slow, due to well, good planning. Again, I want to emphasize to your husband and different people who have served the community. We’ve not let them come in here and swallow us up. Lot of people say well the mayor and the City Council and the city dads are against industry. Lebanon cannot handle industry! We cannot handle big industry. We don’t want big industry. We don’t even want small industry and the people that come to our city want our type of city. Because they want the people that are living in a little farm out at the edge of Lebanon, are living in Lebanon, the wife wants to work, the husband wants to work, they want that type of…that’s the type of labor they want. Just like today, here we are in 1982, if we had a big plant in Lebanon right now that had been laid off, closed down, like many cities have, where would we be? The economy of our town would be terrible. The economy of our town at this time is good. I know we have unemployment, but we don’t have it as great as a lot of cities. We’ve had people on welfare in Boone County, we’ve had people on welfare in Lebanon for years and years and years and we will always have. We got the same, and no disrespect to those people, but we have that same type of people at various times, we’ll have them on welfare basis.B. J. Well, the Bible says, “the poor ye shall have with you always”.Bob That’s right and we will always have that. And something we have, and you and I know, each town has its characters.B. J. Oh, yes.Bob And we have, we have had a history of having a lot of characters in our town, which have been a great part of our community. Many, many people… and I was taught by my father not to run down anyone or make fun of anyone, and you were too, I know. We have some people right in our town that right today, while you are interviewing me in my office, could walk into my office, and I would not tell the people to leave, because they are people in our town, they’re part of it, they’re part of our community. You know them, I know them, they’re great people. Their families have been here, they’ve been here for years and they’re history, they’re history in our town. And we reminisce and we joke about it. And I have had very many sad occasions, very many things that I have had to do for the families. Just for instance, you can remember as well as I can, and I think the world and all of him and I think the world and all of his family. And I was asked a few years ago to have him taken off the street. He was a fella who pushed a cart all his life and I was asked by his family, for his own protection, to talk him into going to a retirement home. One of the hardest jobs I ever had and we were talking about the hard job, that was a hard job, one of the hardest jobs I ever had since I’ve been mayor. I had to go to this man and talk him into putting his cart up. It is still in the city barn.B. J. It is?Bob It is still in the city barn, just like it was the day when I asked him to give it up. We made a…. talk about plea bargaining, I done a little pleading with him. I asked him, his mother at that time, bless her soul, has passed away since, but she was in the hospital and he wanted to see her and I made him a deal, I said I’ll take you to see your mommy, I’ll get you into see your mommy, if you will do what I want you to do, which he did. Of course, he tried to back out on me at the last minute but we…it was a hard job for me to do. He is history in our town, he is part of it, part of our town and that’s what’s made Lebanon.B. J. Well, I think anyone who has lived here all of our lives, as you and I have, remember these people with affection.Bob Oh sure we do. And we were supposed to, we were taught to do that.B. J. Well, they added color.Bob That’s right. As well as the guy that sits down in the coffee shop or in the tavern and makes jokes about different things, we have the characters that drink and so forth, we have the characters that sit around in coffee shops and tell stories about this and that. And hey, if we didn’t have them, we wouldn’t have a community. And to me, it’s a great community cause I can sit back and reminisce. Sometimes I get to thinking, my God, I’m getting to the age where my friends are going down the drain. You know we’re getting to that age that sometimes we wonder if our friends are passing on, but again to me, B. J., Lebanon will always be the same.B. J. Bob, our time, according to my little timer here, is up. I hope this thing works. Thank you very much.Bob I appreciate you having me on.
Source:	http://indianamemory.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/p16066coll4/id/8681
Collection:	Boone County Heritage

Further information on this record can be found at its source.