September 2002                                                  The Megaphone                                                                Page 7

The Monticello Manufacturing Co. is cashing in on local fame with red-white-& blue

Willkie auto tags, which sell for 25¢ and 35¢. Other Elwood factories make kitchen cabinets,

automobile trailers and cans. There are 22 tomato-packing plants in or near the town.

  Pouring rain had turned Elwood's streets into seas of black mud on the September day in 1892 when Major William McKinley of Ohio arrived to dedicate America's first big tin-plate plant. Tin platting had always been an English-Welsh specialty, and foreign competition had killed off earlier attempts to start it in America. But two solid Republicans of nearby Richmond, Ind. named William B. Leeds and Daniel G. Reid had decided that, with Elwood's cheap fuel, they could make a go of tin plating, if they could have some tariff protection to start. Their friend Congressman McKinley, with a 2.2¢-a-lb. duty in his Tariff Act of 1890, had attended to that for them.

Lou Sullivan's Golden Garden, on Anderson Street, is Elwood young folks' favorite hangout.

Dim-lit with red and green neon, it has a swing band with a bar, and poker is played in the "clubroom"

downstairs. Whisky bottles stand on many of the tables. Patrons often bring their own and buy only the

mixers, though Bartender Charlie Sullivan, Lou's brother, tries hard to discourage the practice. In the

white-trellised dance enclosure at the back of the garden there are generally about three

girls to every boy. The boys usually go without coats.

  Wendell Willkie, having been born only seven months earlier, was not on deck to hear McKinley. But he did live to see Messrs. Leeds's and Reid's Elwood enterprise expand to 28 mills, making huge profits for their owners. Behind the tariff wall erected "to protect the American workingman's full dinner pail" he saw hundreds of cheap Welsh workers imported to man the mills. He saw Big Business run the town pretty much as it wanted, had his first day in court helping his lawyer-father, a Bryan Democrat, defend the local union against an anti-picketing injunction. When the gas ran out, he saw factories close up and move away one by one, leaving Elwood flat. Turned by these experiences into a trust-busting college radical who advocated abolition of all inheritances, he has lived to see the great Elwood-found tin-plate fortune enjoyed by a Russian princess, Xenia, the first wife of the president William B. Leeds, and by a Norwegian figure skater, Sonja Henie, new third wife of Daniel Reid's playboy grandson, Daniel Reid Topping.

"Doc" Hinshaw, Elwood's second-richest businessman, has run a drugstore since 1905, still 

does more business than nearby Liggett's and Walgreen's. President of the Elwood Industrial Bureau,

 he thinks Willkie's election will make a boom.

LIFE
August 12, 1940