50 years of Indiana Business: an awareness of the state's "power for greatness and goodness.".

• Position: AROUND INDIANA - Company overview

IT WAS 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.

In Indiana, the postwar boom was continuing to buoy the Hoosier economy. All those cars and homes and household items to be made and sold--it was a great time to be a strong manufacturing state.

It was such a great time, in fact, that a group of Indiana executives and publishers decided to create a magazine focusing on the state's economy and the people, companies and trends that were affecting it. Among the magazine's founders were Chester Cleveland, editor and publisher of The Culver Citizen, and J.H. Albershardt, an Indianapolis business broker who earlier had launched the Indiana Division of State Publicity, which evolved into the Indiana Department of Commerce and more recently into the Indiana Economic Development Corp.

Their magazine was called Indiana Business & Industry, and the first copy rolled off the presses in June of 1957. On that first cover was Glenn Thompson, president and chairman of Columbus-based Arvin Industries, which as an automotive supplier was riding that healthy wave of postwar purchasing.

From the start, Indiana Business & Industry was part journalist and part cheerleader--telling the story of the state's--business but also not ashamed to applaud and support Indiana prosperity. As Cleveland noted, the magazine was dedicated to "maintaining the present highly favorable industrial climate ... and holding Indiana and the Midwest to an awareness of their power for greatness and goodness." To this day, the magazine is focused on sharing stories of Indiana successes--rather than failures.

And there were certainly lots of successes to report back in those first few years. The Indiana Toll Road was just guiding its first travelers--and commerce--across the northern edge of the state. The steel industry was continuing to expand in northwest Indiana. R.R. Donnelley & Sons was boosting Indiana printing operations.

There were also issues to tackle. The new magazine promoted lower taxation at the local and federal levels. It encouraged readers to think about the problem of alcoholism, and noted that the rate of alcoholism was much higher in South Bend than in Fort Wayne. Indiana Business & Industry even took on world hunger, soliciting an essay on that topic by the president of the Ball Brothers Co. of Muncie, Edmund E Ball, who opined that a concerted effort...