40 years of Indiana Business.

• Author: Beck, Bill
• Position: Includes brief articles on the history of Weir Cook Airport to Midway and Indiana Business magazine - Cover Story

1957. It seems like all of 40 years ago, and it seems like just yesterday.

"Ike" was in the White House, victorious the preceding November in his quest for four more years. We had endearing terms for our presidents back then.

And 12 years after Lucky Strikes had gone to war, doctors endorsed cigarettes, extolling different brands' smoothness and good taste.

Business in Indiana and the nation was in the midst of a boom that had begun in the months immediately following World War II and never looked back in the intervening years. America absorbed the millions of returning veterans into the workforce in the late 1940s and embarked upon an economic expansion that was the envy of the world. The pent-up demand for automobiles and houses and appliances and consumer goods that had been thwarted by years of depression and war released billions of dollars for capital investment and purchase of big-ticket consumer durables.

In 1957, inflation was low, unemployment was almost unheard of and the Gross National Product was growing by leaps and bounds. The business of America was business.

THE 1950s

And business in Indiana was good, so good that a group of Hoosier publishers and business executives began laying the groundwork for a new. magazine devoted to Indiana's business and economy. Chester W. Cleveland, one of the founders of the new magazine, was a 35-year veteran of Indiana publishing and the editor and publisher of The Culver Citizen. President of Indiana Business Magazine Inc. was J.H. Albershardt, an Indianapolis business broker and consultant who had started the Indiana Division of State Publicity in 1939, the predecessor of the Indiana Department of Commerce.

The first edition of Indiana Business and Industry - the title wasn't shortened until September 1980 - rolled off the presses in June 1957. The magazine was printed in Culver, and the first cover story acquainted readers with the story of Glenn Thompson and Arvin Industries, the Columbus-based original-equipment manufacturer that was establishing itself as one of the state's principal suppliers to the automotive industry.

IB&I, as it soon became known to its readers, was from the start both journalistic and an advocate in its coverage of the state's economic and business community. The magazine, editor Cleveland wrote in the first issue, "is dedicated to the virile leadership of the task of keeping management well-informed, maintaining the present highly favorable industrial climate, aiding in the shaping of the technical development of industry, and holding Indiana and the Midwest to an awareness of their power for greatness and goodness."

And there was much good news in Indiana's business community. Early on, IB&I reported that National Steel Corp. would build a $700 million mill in Porter County, the "biggest Indiana industrial news in many a day." The magazine covered the 1958 opening of the Indiana Toll Road across the northern, steelmaking region of the state, which meant that steel and other heavy industrial products could move quickly to markets in Chicago, Detroit and Cleveland. The July-August 1958 issue reported a giant new printing operation was planned in Warsaw by R.R. Donnelley & Sons Co. And the August 1959 issue touted Simmons Co.'s construction in Munster of the world's largest and most modern bedding plant.

The magazine also tackled issues pertinent to Indiana businesses. IB&I supported lower taxes and more efficient government. An editorial in 1957 proclaimed that the proposed $73.5 billion federal budget could be cut by $8.2 billion. That savings, if split among American families, "would pay for the electric and gas bills, the family food bills for five weeks of the year, the entire shoe bill for one year, twice the amount of jewelry and toilet articles all families now buy."

On the topic of alcoholism, the September 1957 issue reported on a Yale study citing 4,340 of every 100,000 Hoosiers as problem drinkers. South Bend had the state's highest alcoholism rate at 7,240, while Fort Wayne's rate of 2,760 was the lowest. Another article in the same issue advised businesses to keep better tabs on postage bills, entertainment spending and misuse of coffee breaks.

One of the magazine's earliest profiles was of Terre Haute's Anton "Tony" Hulman Jr. Most Hoosiers knew Hulman as the 1945 rescuer (and subsequent president) of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. But the magazine pointed out in the spring of 1958 that Hulman - a 1924 Yale graduate - was...