You probably never knew what a cool birthday this is.

It isn’t every kid who grows up in a place where his whole hometown throws a festival on his birthday.

I grew up straddling U.S. 40, the Old National Road, in Greenfield, Indiana, and my October 7 birthday fell on the same day and month as the small city’s most famous native son – The Hoosier Poet, James Whitcomb Riley.

Every hamlet in the country has its own version of what often is called an Old Settler’s Day festival, a nod to the good old days that were never as good as people made them sound.

But who’s to judge?

The diligent and sincere folks in Dana, Indiana, will tell you that if you don’t keep your local history alive, it leaves the public consciousness and goes away. And your town goes away. A couple of decades ago, the Indiana State Museum plundered the state historical site in Dana, reduced museum hours and took items donor-designated to the Dana museum in Dana to Indianapolis on the grounds no one visited Dana anymore.

Our Riley Days festival plastered the kindly visage of The Hoosier Poet wearing his turn of the century pince nez spectacles in every scratched old single pane window in the historic old town. The images were omnipresent across the Hancock County seat, and on a fair number of telephone poles as well. After devouring a candy apple one time, I once snatched a mouthful of a woman’s tasty blueish wig, all light and sugary looking in the sunlight gleaming off her Suave hairspray. A patriot performed the Heimich maneuver on me in the gutter outside of the Thomas Drugs and I was fine after a Civil Defense officer told me to rub some dirt on my tonsils and cough it off.

My memories might be embellished with the passage of time.

If you grew up in Greenfield, you grew up with Riley, and you could recite “Little Orphant Annie” with more conviction than the Pledge of Alligiance, which at the time was asking us to duck and cover under our worthless desks, just in case of, oh, a hydrogen bomb attack.

In Riley’s world, Little Orphant Annie would “wash the cups and saucers up, an’ brush the crumbs away, An shoo the chickens off the porch, an dust the hearth, an’ sweep. An’ make the fire, an’ bake the bread, an’ earn her board-an-keep.”

I know now why she was called Little Orphan “AN” nie.

And I have little doubt that she was overworked and underpaid.

An’ (now I’m doing it) beneath this veneer of hard work and wholesomeness, Annie also scared the bejebus out of the kids with her tales of witches and sorcery, and children snatched away in the darkness with nothing but their pants and jacket left behind.

Holy Stephen King.

“An the Gobble-uns ‘at gits you Ef you Don’t Watch Out!” the poet warned.

Riley’s strained pastoral vision of “when the frost is on the punkin and the fodder’s in the shock” painted a more peaceful and serene existence. The beauty of autumn in Indiana. Hayrides. Sneaking in flasks. Pitching woo.

But few children could give two hoot owls about “the clackin’ of the guineys, and the cluckin’ of the hens.” We did believe in spooks.

Historical accounts tell us that Riley was the highest paid poet in all the land in the early 1900s and drew larger audiences nationally than literary geniuses like William Dean Howels, Mark Twain and that devilish scold, the Indiana-raised Ambrose Bierce. Can you imagine Riley in repose? “Mark Twain used to open for me.” It’s a little like Kiss bragging that the Beatles were their opening act.

Inconceivable.

With no shame intended, the unvarnished history about the King of Quaint Pastoral and Dialect Poetry demonstrates that he had a world class affection for alcohol. One often repeated story only differs in the conjecture over the interloper was who tired of Riley’s drunken condition at performances. This person locked Riley in his hotel room in Terre Haute and told him he’d be back to get him at performance time. The location suggests it could have been Riley’s dear friend, the five-time socialist candidate for president, Terre Haute’s Eugene V. Debs. Others guess it was Samuel Langhorne “Mark Twain” Clemens, who performed many times with Riley. And it sounds like something Clemens would do.

Nobody’s fool, nor teetotaler, Riley summoned hotel staff, who would not unlock his door, but agreed to connect straws from a bottle of hootch through the door keyhole. Riley was said to have been greatly satiated by the experience.

Did any of this harm Riley’s reputation? Not in any measurable sense. A “penny campaign” to erect a statue to Riley in Greenfield called for fundraising among the nation’s schoolchildren and collected what is estimated to be about $1.2 million in today’s money. The statue, dedicated in 1918, still strikes a handsome figure, positioned in front of another one of Indiana’s stunningly beautiful courthouses, on the first national road to reach from coast to coast.

Various states and other jurisdictions across the country established a Riley Day or Riley Days that paid tribute to his legend. Indiana’s legislative effort declared that Riley Day souldn’t expire until 1968.

I learned later in life that I not only shared a birthday with James Whitcomb Riley but also John Mellencamp, who some have called, with the best of intentions, Seymour, Indiana’s Riley. Mellencamp, who won the Woody Guthrie Prize in 2018 for his social activism and messages of hope, equality and freedom.

I tell people I call us the Big Three: Riley, Mellencamp, and me.

Nobody else does.

Few people even bother to smile at my joke. When I’ve reminded Mellencamp on several occasions, that he and I share the same birthday, he says something like, “Who cares about birthdays? What are you? Twelve?“

And if I may segue from Riley’s significant mutual admiration society with Eugene V. Debs, who ran for president in 1920 using his prisoner number instead of named after his conviction for sedition … for speaking out against U.S. involvement in W.W. II. . . . no, I’m not suggesting that Riley was a socialist.

Asking for a friend?

But still later in life and to my delight, I learned that another of America’s most fabled labor leaders was also born on October 7. “I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night, alive as you and me … “ Ever hear that one? Joan Baez. Woodstock. Burned into the nation’s consciousness.

Former Bloomingtonian Nell Levin and partner Michael J. Arthur created the Joe Hill Road Show to capture the time and fearless convictions of Joe Hill. A Swedish-born labor activist most closely associated with the Industrial Workers of the World (“the Wobblies”), Hill was executed in 1915 amid significant and widespread allegations that he was set up because of his labor songs and organizing strategies, advocating for the rights of mankind, the protection of child laborers and such radical ideas as worker safety and a five-day work week.

So to you, James Whitcomb Riley. And you, John J. Mellencamp. And you, Joe Hill. Happy to share a birthday with you.

Peace out.🐝