George Ade (1964) By Lee Coyle; and George Ade Anthology (6 book volume)

Hidden in plain sight.  Interestingly enough, the sign above marking the George Ade Plaza on the east bound Indiana Toll Road (I-90) is in Portage, IN, the town where I grew up. As a kid did I ever ask who is George Ade? Well, no, not once. Several weeks ago I received an email about a house for sale in Brook, IN (about halfway between Chicago and Lafayette, IN) -- I almost bought a weekend home in that vicinity ten years ago, and have been receiving occasional For Sale listings ever since. Anyway, I went online to see what I could find out about the town.  I had been to Brook before but really couldn't remember much about the place.  In the Wikipedia post it gave the population as 980 (roughly the size of the Chicago high rise I live in) and it mentioned that George Ade's country estate, Hazelden (pictured below), is in Brook.  There was that name again!

My curiosity won ...  Turns out the life of George Ade very much plays to my Indiana childhood, and to my adult life in Chicago. He was born (in 1866, the year after Abraham Lincoln was assassinated) and raised in Kentland, IN -- farmland just south of "the Calumet Region" which in the later half of the 19th century was also farmland. After graduating from high school, he "went away" to that new college just opened up in Lafayette: Purdue University.  In 1924, as an alumnus, he made a major contribution toward the construction of Purdue's football stadium ... he's the second half of Ross-Ade Stadium, home of the Boilermakers.

While at Purdue he was the editor of the its student newspaper.  He had a job at the Morning Star, a mouthpiece for the local Republican party, but left it for a relatively more profitable position at the Lafayette Call, in part because at the Call he got free press passes to performances at the Grand Opera House in downtown Lafayette.

In 1890 he moved to Chicago and with help from his college buddy John T. McCutcheon, got a job with the Chicago Record covering small time breaking news stories.  This time period was the hey day of Chicago journalism with nearly a dozens daily newspapers competing for the next big headline; it was the newspaper era immortalized by the play, then movie The Front Page. McCutcheon, who was originally from South Raub, IN, would find fame as a newspaper cartoonist -- in later years his work would win the Chicago Tribune its first Pulitzer Prize.  He too has a Toll Road Plaza named after him (the west bound Plaza in Portage) -- tollway plazas are apparently the Hoosier equivalent of a Pulitzer.

Working at the Chicago Record, Ade was promoted and given his own column, titled: Stories of the Street, and of the Town.  He built the column into what became a Chicago journalism staple, stories about the common man on the street -- a later master of this would be the famed Mike Royko, whose fictional Slats Grobnik represented the thoughts of everyday neighborhood guys.  While Ade did not have a regular character like Grobnik, what he did have was a mastery of street slang, and an ear for finding humor -- editors initially skoffed at the slang, until they realized the public loved it.  Ade and McCutcheon would frequently "hit the town" in all-night partying and prowling that provided endless inspiration for their respective careers.  The two would later collaborate on several book projects, and do the "grand tour" of Europe together.

Ade's first works published as books were actually collections or longer versions of his newspaper columns.  He showed an astounding ability to capture different cultural backgrounds, with his Stories of Chicago covering the city's ethnic smorgasborg; Ade's Fables about life in small Midwestern towns, and People You Should Know, among other titles -- six of which have been reprinted recently in George Ade Anthology. These works cover such topics as an around the world trip taken by a successful couple who had never been outside of their small Indiana town before; a story about marrying right, and the downside of penny-pinching (death before you can enjoy life).  One of the better known, and still funny, fables is: The Culture Factory, a several page essay about frat life on a college campus (it appears in People You Should Know).

His fame and fortune however, came not from his books, but from his musical comedies. In 1904 George Ade had three plays running simultaneously on Broadway: The County Chairman; The College Widow, and The Sho-gun (set in Korea, it is a revision of his earlier play The Sultan of Sulu, set in the Philippines).  I cannot find any collection of all of his plays, and it appears that several of the manuscripts have been lost to time.  I've located The County Chairman in the archives of the non-circulating Special Collections section of Chicago's Harold Washington Library, and have an appointment to see it next weekend.

The County Chairman, set in fictional Antioch, is inspired from his experience working at the Lafayette Morning Star covering local politics.  The College Widow is as vintage Hoosier as one can get.  The book is about the football rivalry between fictional Billingham and Atwater Colleges -- by the author's own word, it is patterned after the real life rivalry between the Wabash Little Giants and the DePauw Tigers, now distinguished as the annual Monon Bell game.

Ade's only full length novel, The Slim Princess, is a humorist's version of the standard "the older sister must marry first" plot.  In Ade's telling the story is set in Bulgaria where "fat" is valued as a sign of beauty, creating a problem because the desirable scale-tipping younger sister can't get married because her older sister is "slim" and no one in their country wants her.  The "slim and older" sister is eventually married off to an American playboy.

Recommendation: I have to admit this little research project on George Ade was fun -- as a humorist his work stands the test of time (even if his name has faded away). The biography by Lee Coyle is written in the same vein, and is a great read, though only available second hand because it is out of print (my copy was "withdrawn from stock" from the Belfast Reference Library in Northern Ireland; through Amazon).  The more recent George Ade Anthology provides a good overview of his work, though it contains none of the biography -- it does include The Slim Princess.