Mostly forgotten except by a small group of devoted fans, this artist was once well known in Muncie. He worked as a janitor, a sign painter, a piano player, and composer. He was even known to handcraft violins. Local citizens knew him best, however, as a wandering painter of landscapes. To pick up some cash for meals and, most likely, a drink or two, Oscar Conley Pickett painted his scenes on cardboard, wooden crates, or even glass.

Everyone is familiar with Ball blue jars and with the company’s clear jars. Many have seen green, amber, sun-colored amethyst, and swirled Ball jars. Very few people know, however, that there was once a white Ball jar and even fewer people have seen or own one.

“You can take the lad out of the country but you can’t take the country out of the man,” said the man who loved art, design, movies, dogs, palomino horses, sheep, and rich black soil. W. Edwin Fager was born in 1897 near Fairview, a very small town in Randolph County, Indiana, but spent most of his life working in Chicago or spending time at his farm near Michigan City.

Many of you will remember the Vegematic, made by Ronco and heavily advertised on TV.  The promise was that “It slices, dices, chops and peels, makes thousands of julienne fries in seconds!” Well, to show that there is nothing new under the sun, Muncie had its own version of a similar kitchen specialty back in the early 1920s.

How could such a great, happy photograph come from a morgue? It can when it’s part of a collection of eighty boxes of archival material donated to Minnetrista in 2004 from Ball Memorial Hospital—now IU Health Ball Memorial Hospital. Hundreds of photographs, brochures, annual reports, and other papers documenting the hospital from its beginnings in the 1920s had been squirreled away in the unused morgue in the older building.