Thread: Trumptown, Indiana. I know this place well. Went to high school there. Population 10,000. 95% white. Mostly Roman Catholic. Industrious. Thrifty. Pragmatic. Pride themselves on their common sense.
Surrounding towns have been decimated economically over the past 50 years but Trumptown has done okay through a combination of govt contracts, cheap and undocumented labor, and a dozen shrewd businessmen, one of whom cached $30M and spent it winning a seat in the U.S. Senate...
Early in the last century, when the Klan was active in their part of the state, Trumptown was a sundowner town. More than once growing up there, I heard a grown-up tell of the time when signs at the town boundary included the words, "The sun shall not set on a black face"
When I was growing up there, the town had one Jewish family living there. The Radners. They were extraordinary people. Smart, funny, talented, prosperous. They had a pet monkey. I never even needed to ask around to know they were the only family in town with a pet monkey...
Maury Radner owned and operated the Brooklyn Bargain Basement, a discount clothing store. He was a prominent member of the community. Served on civic committees. Attended weddings, school events and funerals. Few locals knew he was a master cellist and bridge player...
The Radner children were really cool. Eddie Radner sang in the choir and was an Eagle Scout. For fun, he and Chip Murphy, the richest kid in town, would sit behind a shed next to an elevated green of a Par 3 hole at the country club, drink Boone's Farm...
And when a ball hit by someone they knew landed on the green, one of them would crawl out onto the green and drop the ball in the hole, then enjoy the ensuing hole-in-one celebration from their hiding place...
One summer when we were home from college, in Indianapolis, 120 miles from Trumptown, a man named Radner got busted for dealing cocaine. It was stunning how fast the rumor spread through Trumptown that it was Maury Radner who got busted. Shocking how fast people turned on him...
I lived way out on a farm and saw it happen without getting swept up in it. The anti-Semitism going like an out of control fire as the town othered Maury and the Radners. "I always knew he couldn't be making money with that piece-of-shit store," Chip Murphy said to me
It took weeks for the fever to subside. By the time it did, the Brooklyn Bargain Basement was ruined. The poor folk from surrounding communities who'd been his patrons totally bought into the 'drug dealing Jew' narrative and never returned...
Weirdly, Maury Radner and his wife Shirley chose to stay in Trumptown with their family. They did a genius level code switch. Maury opened a jewelry store, the Crown Jewel, in a different part of town, and the same people who'd ostracized him became loyal customers...
I once asked him why, after how he and his family had been treated, he stayed. "The kids are in school here," he said. "Their friends are here. Besides, a person should always hold a place in their heart for forgiveness."
I visited my family shortly before the election and drive through Trumptown. Yard signs favored Trump 10-1. No doubt the voting followed. Whatever lurks there that caused it to believe the worst about Maury Radner despite a lifetime of evidence to the contrary, still lurks...
It lurks the same in thousands of towns and millions of citizens who, on the advice of a TV huckster, choose to believe the worst about anyone who's the least bit like Maury Radner. When you don't know, assume the oddity is the norm. Assume the worst.
Questions we have to answer before we can move on: When will the fever break? What kind of code switching must we do to re-open for business? Can we forgive people like Maury Radner and his family did?
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