Time as a guide built confidence

It was a simple question, but answering it uncorked a flood of memories.

“Didn’t you tell me that you worked at Conner Prairie at one point?” John Young asked in an email.

John’s been involved in Conner Prairie, the living history museum between Noblesville and Fishers, for decades now. He was bringing the current chief executive officer to Jay County to speak at a Rotary meeting. And he was looking for a little background.

He got more than he bargained for.

Before I knew it, I was pounding out an email about a time — 49 years ago! — when I spent a summer working at Conner Prairie.

Earlham College owned and operated the museum in those days, but only about five years had passed since Eli Lilly had gifted it to the college. Everyone — from top to bottom — was still trying to figure out the place’s future.

In those days, much of what you see at Conner Prairie today simply wasn’t there.

A typical tour started at an old barn that had been ineffectually turned into something of a visitors’ center. Two big blue Harvestore silos still stood outside on a large pad of concrete. 

The tour included a pioneer barn, a cabin, a trading post, a springhouse, the loom house and the restored brick home of Indiana pioneer and civic leader William Conner.

All of that had been restored by Eli Lilly, though it hadn’t been restored by the professional museum standards of today. In fact, those standards were still being hammered together.

Everyone knew what Colonial Williamsburg was, a Rockefeller-funded recreation, and everyone knew what Greenfield Village was, a Henry Ford hodge-podge of buildings with no unifying historical theme. No one quite yet knew what Conner Prairie was.

In fact, the guy who was director that summer when I worked there had a grandiose notion of recreating downtown Indianapolis circa 1836 along the lines of Williamsburg. That didn’t happen, and he soon departed.

What was my job? It depended upon the day. Some days I was a tour guide. Some days I was using a jackhammer to break up that concrete pad by the silos. Some days I painted fences or whatever else needed to be painted.

There were eight of us working there that summer: Four guys and four girls.

The guys slept in a little bungalow that included a kitchen and a common room with a black and white console TV. The girls slept in a red brick structure just south of the Conner house that I believe has since been torn down.

The eight of us had an elaborate system of rotating the shopping/cooking duties among us. Of the guys, one was a Purdue student who later ended up working with my wife in the air pollution control division of the Indiana State Board of Health, one went on to teach history at Earlham and recently retired, and one was a guy from Indiana State University I have since lost track of.

All in all, it was a good summer.

I’m not sure I learned much while running the jackhammer, other than the fact that I didn’t want to run a jackhammer for a living.

But I grew a lot as a tour guide.

Like most kids of that age — I was 19 — I hated public speaking. I’d avoided class plays in high school and froze up at the thought of giving a speech in class. Even class discussions in college were enough to provoke some anxiety.

Being a guide — being placed in the role of storyteller for a group of a dozen or two dozen, trying to keep the interest of fifth graders in summer school — literally changed my life.

I didn’t find it easy. But I learned that I could do it. And with doing it came the confidence to keep on doing it.

Not a bad dividend from a summer job after all, is it?