From the Files of the Kosciusko County Historical Society

This is a retrospective article that runs a few times a month on InkFreeNews.

Information for this retrospective series is courtesy of the Kosciusko County Historical Society. For more history of Kosciusko County in the news visit yesteryear.clunette.com

Feb. 1, 1989 — Kosciusko County officials considered the purchase of the financially troubled fairgrounds.

A county takeover of the 68-acre property north of Winona Lake was discussed among other options to resolve the fair association’s financial woes.

County commissioners and council representatives met in an executive session. One councilman said talk about acquiring the fairgrounds was the “crux of the meeting,” and that at the time little opposition was expressed.

Feb. 2, 1968 — Declaring massive non-violence as the person of color’s most potent weapon for social justice, that violence creates more problems than it solves, Dr. Martin Luther King Thursday called for legislation to improve housing, education and more jobs for people of color.

King, speaking to students at Manchester College yesterday, said, “As long as justice is postponed, we will always face the danger of these long, hot, violent summers.” He assailed whites for creating the conditions which “have brought despair and anger to the Negro community.”

King said that in the state of Mississippi, more than 64 people of color and civil rights workers have been killed in the past several years during the period. Fifty-eight churches there at the time had been burned.

“More than 40 percent of Negroes in our country find themselves living in substandard housing, with wall-to-wall rats and roaches,” said King.

He charged that students of color in cities are attending inadequate overcrowded schools.

The United States is spending $500 to kill each Viet Cong, but only $53 a year for each person in the anti-poverty program, he stated.

Feb. 6, 1963 —A widowed daughter of a once socially prominent pioneer Warsaw family was found murdered in her modest Winona Lake home on College Ave.

The brutally stabbed and bludgeoned body of Mrs. Louise (White) Bolinger, 56, an employee since 1956 in the nearby bindery department of the Free Methodist Publishing House, was discovered in the single car garage by a fellow employee, Albert Wilson.

Feb. 6, 1974 — Two Warsaw industries have shut down, idling approximately 445 workers due to a national truck driver strike. As a result, the Warsaw Chamber of Commerce Industrial Division urged the assembly of the Indiana National Guard to assure peaceful truck transportation.

The chamber industrial division sent a telegram to U.S. Senators Birch Bayh (D.-Ind.) and Vance Hartke (D.-Ind.) and to Gov. Otis R. Bowen seeking an immediate call-out of the National Guard.

Industries closed by the strike at the time were Korth Furniture, which employed about 270 persons in two Warsaw plants during the period and Sun Metal Products, with approximately 175 employees according to news reports.

Gatke Corp. of Warsaw slowed production due to the strike.