If you considered our downtowns to once be the gathering places for our cities and towns, then you could consider your local mall to be America’s second gathering place. That’s appropriate, because malls largely killed off downtowns.
Downtowns across the country have staged and are staging something of a comeback. They entered a steep decline in the late 1960s and early 1970s as malls were built and first retailers and then customers moved away from downtowns to the new gathering places, the mall.
In my hometown of Muncie, the mall – Muncie Mall – opened, more or less, in 1970, years later than the first U.S. mall, Southdale Center in Edina, Minnesota, which opened in 1956. Big department stores left Muncie’s downtown, with Sears being the first anchor store to open at the mall. Downtown was, in a decade or less, pretty hollowed out and storefronts along Walnut Street were left empty or occupied by small businesses and, in one instance, an adult bookstore.
Like a lot of cities and a lot of malls, Muncie and Muncie Mall struggled mightily in the first decade of the 21st century. I was covering business at the time and retailers – some with problems nationally, like Sears – closed their doors.
I was back in Muncie over the weekend and we had to check out the mall, which has been the scene of a lot of demolition work in the past year. The three-screen movie theater, where I spent a lot of time as a young movie fan, was razed. More recently, the wings that had been occupied by Sears and J.C. Penney have been or are being demoed.
The photo above is one I took this weekend and it shows that one empty third of the mall is roped off.
There’s still a few tenants in the mall, most notably Books-A-Million, which supposedly has a five-year lease. Does that mean the rest of the structure will be pulled down around and behind it, or will BAM find a spot elsewhere or leave the city entirely? I don’t know.
If you’re interested in the lifetime of a Midwestern mall, you’ll be interested in the timeline by Robin Gibson in The Star Press newspaper that I’ll link to at the end.
I won’t wax on about what malls meant to us or Muncie Mall meant to me. You can probably find my writing about that elsewhere, including as a chapter of our third true crime book, THE WESTSIDE PARK MURDERS. Our book covers a still-unsolved double killing of two teenagers in 1985 and I included a chapter about Muncie Mall because the mall was a big place for us back then.
You’ve somehow stumbled upon the latest of more than 1,100 posts on keithroysdon dot com, stretching back to the early 2010s. Books, writing, movies, TV, obscure pop culture, Halloween, snark and more snark. I’m the author of crime novels THAT OCTOBER and SEVEN ANGELS, co-author of four true crime books including the award-winning THE WESTSIDE PARK MURDERS and hundreds of short stories, news articles and pop culture pieces in spots like CrimeReads, Daily Yonder and elsewhere. You can contact me by leaving a message anywhere on this site or by hollering at me on one of my too many social media outposts.
I subscribe to two newspapers – three if you count the Washington Post, which I haven’t looked at in a few years – so I can’t tell you the state of the art for various newspaper departments, especially in print. I rarely see the print editions of any newspapers.
I certainly can’t tell you what newspaper obituary sections look like these days. I’d imagine they’re a lot less extensive than they were in the mid-1980s, when I was a young newspaper reporter who, among other things, covered news events, wrote feature stories, wrote about entertainment and, for a couple of years, was the obituary editor of The Muncie Evening Press.
(My thoughts revert to the business of newspaper obituaries today because of a new practice originated by the Baltimore Beat newspaper, which is offering bargain-priced obituaries at prices as low as $5 for a simple online death notice. Link at the bottom of this post.)
Back in the day, newspapers would on some days be inundated with obits. We’d get a dozen or a couple of dozen – you couldn’t plan for those numbers, of course, even if you asked local funeral homes how many obits we could expect from them, because in some cases surviving family members would show up abruptly at the funeral home to make arrangements – and a sudden increase in quantity would mean we’d have to jump the obit page to another page, where it would sometimes crowd out news stories. Sometimes it would jump more than one page. Too many obits was chaos. Frankly, obits were considered chaos by some of us. There was a considerable amount of pressure involved with obituaries, especially for an afternoon paper that published just after noon. We’d rush like madmen all morning to get a newspaper put together, including the obits.
At the time, newspapers did not get paid for obituaries. That changed maybe 10 or 15 years ago, when newspaper advertising departments, rather than newsrooms, started handling obits and funeral homes, which had almost certainly always passed along the “cost” of a newspaper obituary to survivors, made an obit a line item in the total funeral bill.
But back then, newspapers didn’t charge for obits and considered it a public service. As such, obits were considered news articles and were subject to editing for accuracy. For instance, if someone’s obit claimed the deceased person had been president of the United States and they had not actually been POTUS, we’d cut that reference.
During the couple of years I was obit editor, that task fell to me, a 20-something who’d rather have been writing important or at least entertaining newspaper stories. That’s why they paid me the big bucks: A few years ago I saw a record of my Social Security-eligible earnings over the decades and it indicated that one of those first couple of years when I was doing obits I was paid about $14,000 in annual pay. Google tells me that would be a salary of about $45,000 today, but it was enough money even then to persuade me to shut up and do the job.
My couple of years editing obits were made much worse than they might have been by the top executive at the local newspaper, who was a horrible bully. He did have knowledge of the local community and issued style sheets listing the correct names of local factories. Without those, I would never have known the correct name of the local business we all referred to as Frank’s Foundry was The Frank Foundry. But for all the usefulness of his knowledge and his style sheets, we all had to put up with someone who was horribly abusive to the staff, including the top editors.
I still vividly remember how much we all dreaded the time around 1 p.m. each day, when our afternoon newspaper was published and all of us – who had seen proofs of pages but it was hard to catch every error – waited for this top executive, up in his office, to look through the fresh newspaper, find an error and call down to the newsroom and rage about how stupid and incompetent we all were. (That’s not an exaggeration.) I’ll never forget one day when he found a typo in a story – not one of my obits, luckily, that day – and made each of three editors get on the phone with him and correctly spell some common word that had been misspelled in a typo. Like “please” or “elephant” or something.
Being obit editor was not fun and I was happy when, within a few years, I was given an actual beat, county government, to cover. Writing about elected officials who lied and wasted our tax dollars was less stressful than editing obits.
Doing obits for a couple of years was a genuine education in humanity and human behavior. Nothing – nothing – brings out the worst traits in people as readily as the death of a family member. This was most obvious when a family that had been torn apart by some feud or falling out was then hit by the death of a parent or adult child. The family members who were making funeral arrangements – and paying the funeral home for them – would simply leave out an estranged family member. All of a sudden, the family had only two children, as the black sheep offspring was forgotten.
At the time, when obits were considered news stories and not paid advertisements, I hated this. It meant that the obit was not an accurate historical record because children or estranged parents were omitted. But we couldn’t accept the word of a person who called and said, “Hey, I was left out of my mom’s obituary.” What if the call had been a hoax? We had to refer them to the funeral home that supplied the information and tell them that if the funeral home verified them to us, we’d run the obituary again.
Dealing with the funeral homes was usually fine but sometimes odd. The funeral directors were usually under enormous pressure from the families – especially in times of split families – and they didn’t always treat obit editors very well.
On the flip side, the funeral homes were, like a lot of businesses, in the holiday practice of distributing gifts. More than a few times, I was the recipient of a bottle of whiskey (I’d usually pass it along to an editor at the newspaper since beer and vodka were my poison).
The former obit editors at the paper would laughingly recall the year that one funeral home gifted the newspaper – and presumably others in the community – with something other than booze: a jar of pickles.
Given the preserving/embalming nature of the funeral business, the gifts of pickles were mostly regifted to people who didn’t know they came from a mortuary, I’m told.
Here’s the link to the Baltimore Beat story about bargain-basement obits:
If I were to turn this space into a full reporting of every assault on books and literacy and writing and publishing and privacy and freedom of choice, I’d never get anything done. The folks at Book Riot – that’s their image above – are doing a good job of keeping track of every petty tyrant’s ambitions to tell you what you can and can’t read.
But I will note this: In a month of frustration and anger at the attack on books and our freedom – and you bet your ass those two are connected – by everything from greedy AI companies (who need to go broke and out of business sooner rather than later, please and thank you) and petty tinpot wannabe dictators over their own little fiefdoms, there’s little that has presented as so ignorant and intolerant as “We’re coming for the books,” uttered recently by repugnant Republican Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick.
Here’s how the Texas Tribune reported it on August 19:
Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick on Wednesday vowed to pass legislation punishing public schools that do not remove graphic books from their shelves by knocking them down a notch in the state’s annual school performance ratings, which the state uses to seize control of underperforming districts.
Flanked by easels displaying printed covers of books he found obscene, the lieutenant governor said school boards and administrators have not been following a 2025 law aimed at weeding out lewd books from the shelves in Texas’ more than 9,000 campuses attended by some 5.5 million schoolchildren.
“It’s the law and we expect you to follow the law. So we’re coming for the books,” Patrick said during a news conference at the Texas Capitol. “We ask that you do it on your own and remove these books.”
The law from last year, Senate Bill 13, granted school boards the authority to approve and remove books based on complaints they receive, such as those from parents and activist groups. Before, those powers largely belonged to school librarians. But Patrick said an overwhelming majority of school boards have not taken any action, as the law nears one year in effect.
Patrick is no stranger to controversy over his ignorant, intolerant and politically questionable acts. I’ll leave it to more comprehensive online sources to tell you about that.
Book Riot notes that this is “manufactured panic over the content of books in school libraries,” and there’s certainly some head-shaking in noting that Patrick was conducting a publicity stunt for his podcast. The far-right activist/busybody who stood on stage with him was his next podcast guest and she’s put together a list of 2,200 “dirty books” that Patrick is touting as the state’s unofficial list of books that will get school libraries in trouble.
All of you know this space has become increasingly noisy lately regarding authoritarian-wannabe and oligarchs’ attacks on books and writing and publishing and privacy and freedom, because please have no doubt that anytime a politician and would-be authoritarian wants to ban books in school libraries, what they really want to do is control every aspect of your life, from your reading material to who you marry and how and when you reproduce.
Huge sweeping generalization there? I’m not gonna go the easy route and compare these wannabe dictator moves to the best-known authoritarian movement of the 20th century, But that’s what’s at work here.
So to cop a phrase from the old gun lobby bumperstickers, “You can have my books when you pry them out of my cold, dead fingers.”
As Kelly Jensen so ably put it in that Book Riot piece:
If laws like SB 13 are about local control, then why does one partisan activist brag about having been engaged in censorship attempts at 163 schools where she doesn’t have a student or pay taxes toward? Why does one partisan activist get to decide which 2,200 books are illegal in Texas?
This isn’t about local control. It’s about Republican control of anything and everything, down to local availability of books.
Anyone who follows me on social media – bless you dear folks – knows that I’ve been promoting my new crime novel SEVEN ANGELS, which publishes June 1 from our own Constellate Publishing.
When I wrote SEVEN ANGELS in 2019 I was living in Indiana but had a history with Tennessee: My parents were from the little town I based Seven Angels the town on. And I had family members in Tennessee and still do. More than three years ago, I moved from Indiana to Knoxville, where the finishing touches of the novel were written.
I didn’t get to hear “Southern Comfort,” a song by the sister blues/rock/country duo Larkin Poe, when I was writing SEVEN ANGELS, but I’ve grown to love the song and feel it relates closely to SEVEN ANGELS with its story of a woman who returns to her home place.
There’s a verse in Larkin Poe’s “Southern Comfort” that struck a nerve:
Left my soul in the Nickajack God willing, I’ll find my way back Counting down, my days are numbered Gimme, gimme that southern comfort
But what is the Nickajack?
There are more accomplished historians than me – I’m not one at all, really – who can tell you better what the Nickajack is or was, but it was basically parts of two states, Alabama and Tennessee, that didn’t support the Southern ideal of slavery and whose leadership considered secession from the Southern secession movement.
The Nickajack would have been a state of its own, independent of Tennessee and Alabama, and an ally of the North. Leaders of the Nickajack modeled their secession plans after West Virginia’s exit from Virginia.
It never came to that, fortunately or unfortunately, because that would no doubt have cost lives if hostilities had broken out.
And the defeat of the South by the Union meant that the boosters of the Nickajack’s statehood movement dropped their plans.
So when the Lovell sisters of Larkin Poe sing about leaving their souls in the Nickajack, they’re talking about a pro-Union, anti-slavery part of the country, made up of parts of Alabama and East Tennessee, where I live now and where SEVEN ANGELS’ main character is from. Gloria Shepherd is a prosecutor’s investigator in Knoxville as the story begins but she returns to her home of Seven Angels in Crockett County, where much of the story takes place.
So now you know at least a little about the Nickajack. There’s more out there, especially about the Native American history of the area and the African American history of the Nickajack, and I’ll link to that below.
Credit to the Justin Brown and the Battleground substack for a lot of history and for that illustration of the Nickajack above.
