Herman Campbell

Herman Campbell was a soda jerk at the W. T. Bowles drug store in Bloomington, Indiana in May of 1917 when he learned of a unique opportunity to earn $50; all he had to do was parachute from a hot air balloon.

The University Courts Realty Company had contracted with the American Town Lot Company to stage a promotion for the University Courts subdivision in which former Indiana schoolteacher Clara Belmont would do precisely that not once but twice on successive weekends in May. Oddly, the paper referred to this feat as an ‘ascension’. In an interview published in the Bloomington Telephone newspaper on May 11, 1917, Clara said “I took up ballooning because I liked it a whole lot better than school teaching. It’s dangerous but really I’d rather have a nice quick death than by being buried away slowly by inches. Besides I like the excitement and the crowds and I like to travel and there’s more money in it than in teaching school”.

The publisher of the Telephone was Walter Bradfute, a stockholder and officer in the University Courts Realty Company. The pages of the Telephone carried several stories about the event. In addition to this free advertising, full-page ads appeared in the Indiana Daily Student. For as little as $25 down and $10 per month, you too could own a lot in University Courts.

In addition to the two parachute jumps by Clara, the Telephone on May 15th began to promote an amateur parachute jump: “groups of Bloomington men have raised a purse and will promote a flight by a local man the last of this week. This is to give a purse of $75 for the flight and let the local volunteer put up the $25 guarantee that he will go up. Four “aviators” of Bloomington will be signed up and if one fails the other three will be given a chance to ascend or “eat crow”. The men who are promoting the exhibition bar women and girls”.

On the 18th the Telephone reported that Herman and five other men had applied, “The man making the ascension is to receive $50 – when he gets back on earth”. The date was not fixed, but was to be one of three days. It appears that it was ultimately planned for Sunday, May 20th.

However, the American Town Lot Company put the kibosh on the amateur event, as indicated in a letter to the editors of the Telephone printed therein on May 19th entitled “Against Sunday Ascensions”. It reads in part, “Our present contract with Mr. Carrow ends after the ascension Saturday afternoon and it has been his plan all along to leave Bloomington Saturday night. We do not sanction balloon ascensions of that kind, and anything that has been done along this line has been without our consent. We deeply appreciate the courteous treatment we have received at the hands of the citizens of Bloomington and certainly could not approve of any acts against the good morals of the community”. Mr. Carrow apparently left town on Saturday as planned, taking his balloon with him, as there is no further mention of the amateur event in the pages of the Telephone.

All this might be only a curious footnote in Bloomington history except that 1) Herman Campbell was African-American and 2) one of the earliest known examples of a racially exclusive covenant in Monroe County and the first for University Courts appears less than a week after the aborted amateur ‘ascension’.

Herman Campbell was the subject of a cringe-worthy Telephone article of May 18th entitled “Bloomington May See First Ascension for Colored Race”. It cited Rev. H. V. Eagleson as an authority on African-American achievement. The article read in part, “…if Campbell goes up he will be the first man of the colored race to make an ascension and parachute leap with a hot air bag. Campbell is signed up and his forfeit of $25 posted and the betting about town is about even on whether he will get ‘cold feet’ or go up”.

Apparently, the University Courts Realty Company found the odds that Herman would invest his $25 refund in a University Courts lot uncomfortably high. Alternatively, perhaps he actually did try to put the money down on a lot and was refused, with that part of the tale being lost over the course of a hundred years. In any event, a deed recorded on May 26th, 1917, in Deed Book 65, pages 296-297 in the Monroe County Recorder’s office transfers Lot 34 in the Second Court of University Courts Addition to Mrs. Hundley B. Kenney. Amid several other covenants it requires that ‘no slaughter house or nuisance of any kind or anything obnoxious to a good residence neighborhood shall ever be allowed on said real estate, and the same shall never be rented to a colored person, or sold to a colored person’.

Herman Campbell appears in the historical record a few more times. An Indianapolis grand jury called him as a witness along with Postmaster Walter Bradfute and others in a case of theft from a sack of mail at the Bloomington Monon station. He was on a team of Bloomington African-Americans who won the 1914 football championship in a segregated league in Indiana. He appears in a photo of the team in the University Archives. He suffered an occupational injury at the Showers Bros. furniture factory in March of 1916. The Daily Student reported that he and two other musicians played ragtime for three hundred students in the Student Building as they awaited telegrams reporting the progress of the Indiana-Wisconsin football game in October of 1909 (Badgers 6, Hoosiers 3). And in the oral tradition of the African-American community in Bloomington, as related by Elizabeth Bridgwaters, he also played music and collaborated with Hoagy Carmichael and was the actual author of the tune for ‘Stardust’. He died in June of 1944.