Well, this letter is a doozy! I will let you read then I will comment.
Well, here we are again, Al missing Elma. It is March in northern Indiana so the weather is a bit unpredictable. I think that the real news here is that grandpa installed phones at the KKK headquarters in Kokomo Indiana. So of course I did some research. Grandpa had the name a little bit wrong. The name is Mafalfa Park. I found more information at the digital civil rights museum at Ball State University. Here is what they had to say: “On July 4, 1923, approximately 200,000 members of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) met at Malfalfa Park in rural Kokomo, Indiana [1]. The crowd gathered to celebrate the state’s transition from a KKK Province to a Realm and to inaugurate a new Indiana Grand Dragon [2]. As the great number of attendees suggests, the Klan was well established in Indiana by the 1920s. The KKK originated in the South after the Civil War, but quickly spread to other states, where members pursued their mission to intimidate people that diverged from their profile of an ideal American. Their targets included African Americans, Jews, immigrants, and Catholics.”
There is a lot more at the digital civil rights museum page above, but suffice to say that Indiana had one of the largest Klan memberships with Klaverns as they were called in every county and the governor and US senators were controlled by the KKK. Embarrassing and disgusting. And there was grandpa in the middle of all of it. Above I cited that the KKK was against Catholics. In my ignorance I did not realize this but grandpa probably knew and that’s why he expressed such trepidation at entering the building.
I am so glad that times are at least a little bit different now, but it is a good reminder that we’re not that far off from that time.
Mafalfa Park is now Camp Tycony, a YMCA camp just west of Kokomo on 52 acres.