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Women drivers had a slow on-ramp into the racing world of the Indy 500. Janet Guthrie blazed the trail in 1977, changing the traditional invitation, “Gentlemen, start your engines,” to something more inclusive.
The brutal murder of a young African-American woman during the civil rights era has long fueled one small Indiana town’s reputation as a hive of racist hatred.
While John Dillinger might be considered Indiana’s most notorious gangster, and the Reno gang of Seymour credited with having invented the train robbery, a different Hoosier miscreant may have left the largest footprint on American folklore. Before astronaut Virgil “Gus” Grissom put Mitchell on the map, the small town’s best-known native son was undoubtedly Sam Bass.
Although it’s certainly not the geographic center of the continental United States, the state of Indiana has nonetheless played the role of “The Crossroads of America”.