Living on “McCall Street” in “Middletown”

It must have been a sight to see when local photographer Roger Pelham drove through the streets of Muncie taking pictures of houses in neighborhoods, from Westwood to Avondale to Normal City, for a special edition of McCall’s Magazine. This edition played on the notoriety of Muncie as the typical American community, as depicted by Robert and Helen Lynd in the Middletown books. “In order, therefore, to show these people of “Middletown” as PEOPLE, and not merely as statistics, we visited “McCall Street” in Muncie, photographed the home of everyone who subscribed to McCall’s in 1937, and talked with many of them to find just how McCall’s entered into their lives.”

That amounted to almost 1,000 houses! When he donated his copy of this special edition to Minnetrista, Roger told me how he managed this photographic feat. He was working on a short time frame and had to figure out the fastest, most efficient way to cover the city from end to end. And that he did. Roger had the passenger door removed from his car, so that he could sit facing the houses along each street. Then, with a friend as a driver, he crisscrossed the city snapping picture after picture.

He got the job done, the photos went to the editors of McCall’s, and the magazine quickly appeared on the newsstand. What we have now is a great documentation of houses of that time period. Unfortunately, what we don’t have are addresses. Having those would have been icing on the cake.