In the years since 2007, when the Miracle Mile Parade was revived for the Indianapolis Southside community, I’ve forgotten how I learned about that year’s parade so that I could attend and get the pictures you see on this page.
There probably was a blurb about it in the local daily or community weekly newspapers. What I remember most (or best?) about the parade, was that I was so impressed by what I saw.
During my years living on the Southside, so many Southsiders had chips on their shoulders because of a perceived impression that the City-County government treated them like second-class citizens. They felt they were always shortchanged or after-thoughts whose neighborhoods and/or communities never got the funding needed to do the things they saw Northsiders receive..
So after the parade, I felt I needed to say thanks to whomever had a hand in putting this together. That person turned out to be Jeff Cardwell, who at the time was my City-County Council representative and the owner of Cardwell’s Do It Best hardware store on Madison Avenue.
I went to the store one day not long after the parade and an employee led me to an upstairs office where Cardwell was working. We chatted for a while, during which I expressed my gratitude and compliments, just as I had intended. I also handed him a CD containing copies of the pictures that I’d taken of the parade.
As a rule, I haven’t done something like that very often through the years, but I felt it was warranted ... and I thought Cardwell deserved a lasting memory of what his efforts on behalf of the Southside produced. He invited me to become a member of the somewhat new Gateway Business Alliance, which technically was the organization that worked to produce the parade and had other goals in mind for the Southside.
If I hadn’t have been still working for The Indianapolis Star, where doing such things could be construed as a conflict of interest (especially if your connections to the newspaper would be used for the organization to gain influence in publicity), I might have given it some thought. But I declined the offer (I forget if I explained to Cardwell the conflict of interest rationale).
He then handed me a book written by Millard Fuller, who with Fuller’s wife, Linda, had served as grand marshals of the parade. Fuller was the co-founder and former president of Habitat for Humanity International. When he left that organization in a dispute with its board 30 years later, he founded the Fuller Center for Housing.
Cardwell told me how Fuller had been an inspiration to him — and so many others.
By the time the 2008 rendition of the parade was held, Photo Potpourri still had not yet launched, so those photos also have never been presented in a post here before. I’ll present a post with those images in the next chapter. I made a point to mail or drop off copies of those pictures to Cardwell, too.
I don’t recall that Cardwell bothered to acknowledge receipt, so those were the last photos of Miracle Mile parades that I shared with him, even though I photographed several more annual parades until the event ceased to exist sometime after the 2013 rendition.
The parades featured marching bands, politicians, appearances by community businesses, police and fire departments, the Indianapolis Police Motorcycle Drill Team, the Johnson County Mini-Mystics, the Garfield Park Conservatory, members of the nearby Emmerich Manual High School football team, representatives of nearby churches, Corvette Club members and their cars, other classic cars, and even the Indianapolis 500 Gordon Pipers bagpipe and drum ensemble.
Coming tomorrow: Chapter 13, 2008 Miracle Mile Parade
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