The Things You Never Know

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It’s pretty amazing how you can go someplace so many times that you don’t need your GPS anymore…and still you don’t know anything about the place! Case in point: Richmond, Indiana. Richmond is on the Indiana/Ohio border on Interstate 70. I used to come here all the time because they had a Putt Putt and we had tournaments there. (I won the last tournament we played there. ) Other than playing at the course, about the only thing I knew about Richmond was that it had a recording studio in the 20s and 30s (I knew that because I helped type the Tony Russell discography, and always saw Gennett and Richmond mentioned. And more on that later.) Come to find out, Richmond, Indiana was the site of a terrible tragedy in 1968. On Saturday, April 6, 1968, a natural gas leak caused an explosion at the Marting Arms Sporting Goods store on the corner of Main Street and South 5th. The explosion caused another explosion, this one caused by all of the bullets and gunpowder stored in the sporting goods store’s basement. Let me give you just a little background: April 6, 1968 less than two days after Reverend Martin Luther King’s assassination in Memphis. There were riots all over the country. One of the first things that officials did was assure people it was NOT the result of racial fighting. That didn’t make the news any less horrific: forty-one individuals were killed, and 126 buildings were damaged. The epicenter of the explosion, the sporting goods store, was leveled. Today, I stopped by where the explosion happened. As you can see (bottom right), they’re putting some apartments there. The upper right photo is the buildings that were next to the sporting goods store’s location. They are still standing. On the left, you see the memorial, which is a block up the street. I texted the memorial photo to a friend of mine and told him that, in all the years we’d been up here to play golf tournaments, I’d never known this part of Richmond history. He replied that he worked for a company based here for 20 years and also had no idea this had happened. There is a documentary on YouTube about it, titled 1:47 (after the time when the explosion happened). I will caution that there are some graphic descriptions in the interviews, but it shows the devastation and the heartbreak that happened. And now I know…and you do, too. PHOTOS: (Left) Memorial to the 41 killed in the explosion (Upper right) Buildings on Main Street that survived the 1968 explosion (Lower right) Apartments under construction where the sporting goods store had been.