Archibald McKinlay Papers

Biographical / Historical

Archibald McKinlay IV was born to Scottish Immigrant parents in 1927. He grew up in Indiana Harbor, where his father worked at Inland Steel. He graduated from Indiana University and moved with his wife, Florence Dunlap, to Schenectady, NY as a management trainee with General Electric Company. The McKinlay Family, which soon included Scott, Kay, and Kimberly, lived "out east" for several years.

Following his tenure with GE, McKinlay was Director of Information for the National Safety Council, where he sired "The National Drivers' Test," the highest-rated public affairs program in the history of television at the time. He was Director of Communications for the Nixon Presidential campaign, and Director of Public Affairs for the Office of Economic Opportunity.

Returning to Chicago, McKinlay consulted in the areas of marketing, public relations, and communications with companies and not-for-profit organizations; wrote, directed, and produced multi-media presentations; and taught logic and rhetoric/thinking skills at Roosevelt University.

McKinlay is best known to Regionites as the author of "Calumet Roots," his Sunday column in the Times of Northwest Indiana that ran from 1981 until early 2014. Few appreciate that the columns were usually a by-product of in-depth research that explored the Region's history, its people, and the unique "environment" that was the Calumet Region in its early years.

His research found more scholarly expression in the production of a series of monographs on the Region's founders and early history; a book titled Reejin Archetypes, Book One of Duh Reejin, A Workaday Mythology; and pictorial histories of East Chicago ("Twin City"), Whiting ("Oil and Water"), and Lake County ("Chicago's Neighboring South Shore"). His research also led to a significant number of unpublished writings based on the era from the coming of the railroads in the 1850s to the beginning of the Kefauver hearings in 1950 when, he asserts, Duh Reejin ceased to exist.

McKinlay credited his interest in the history of Northwest Indiana to Powell A. Moore, author of The Calumet Region, Indiana's Last Frontier. In 1990 he wrote:

"Once, when I was having difficulty sleeping, a writer who worked for me suggested that I read a book of history. It worked. History qua history-as-bitter-pill still puts me to sleep, and as I think about my exposure to academic history, I realize it always has –- with one important exception. That was when I had a class at the I.U. Extension in the late forties and Powell A. Moore was the teacher. What a difference!

History suddenly became a story about humankind in which I could participate. It was no longer stewed turnips that I had to eat because it was good for me. History was a series of event explanations that gave me insights into my own existence – explanations with which I could agree or disagree. History became an experience. Professor Moore made me think.

Professor Moore also introduced us to the incredible idea that Duh Reejin and the towns in it had a history, and that it could be related to events that propelled the planet. The idea seemed silly to me because at that time my hometown of Indiana Harbor wasn't even fifty years old, and instead of being filled with Monticello-like structures, the bracing air of colonial America, and the voices of freedom, The Harbor was filled with smokestacks, soot, and the babble of a hundred foreign tongues, relatively few of them capable of unbroken English.

To think that Duh Reejin contributed anything but sweat and its odor to America's moment in the sun challenged my imagination more than a page-long sentence by William Faulkner. And yet I learned, as Professor Moore drew it out of us Menos, that Duh Reejin is what freedom is all about, and I developed that lesson into a belief that Reejin history, when read with a bemused smile, is richer than the history of any part of the nation."

In 1980-81 McKinlay published a series of three monographs titled "Swamp Baron" about George Washington Clark and Jacob Forsyth, who owned and began development of large tracts of marshland at the foot of Lake Michigan. As a result, he began to be recognized as a Region historian and was invited to write a weekly column to celebrate the 75th Anniversary year of The Times of Northwest Indiana. The column continued for more than 30 years.

The columns were of tremendous importance to McKinlay's work. They gave him a way to share the information he was collecting, and readers brought ideas, information, and experiences to his receptive ear.

And all the while he was writing the columns, he was also researching the history of the area's development and of the pioneers and entrepreneurs, saints and sinners who settled one of the most industrialized, most ethnically diverse societies in the nation.

McKinlay was not a usual historian. As passionate as he was about preserving knowledge of the region's past, he was passionate in his belief that history should be fun and interesting. Thus, his style of writing was frequently witty, exaggerated, wry, ironic, politically incorrect, irreverent, or playful. He not only wrote straightforward columns, but ballads, poems, limericks, skits, and games. In a 1994 column he noted "If you're a regular reader, you know that I rarely relay information straightforwardly." And another time, "To make history entertaining is my wont." He loved to play with language and words, and rarely published a column that didn't require the reader to have a dictionary at hand. He was a great storyteller and a good listener – he struck up conversations with everyone he met, and usually came away with another story, or an idea for one.

One of his most popular columns was "You may be a Harborite," which offered a variety of "questions" whose answers caused the reader to recall his own history.

His primary tool for making history interesting was to teach it "upside down." "Students generally know little about their history because history doesn't mean anything to him or her. It's just so many ancient dates and data to be memorized. Dullsville. But it can be made not only meaningful, but fun – how? By teaching history upside down."

Pick a subject. Any subject. By starting with something current – say the name of Indianapolis Boulevard – trace its history back from today to Jacob Forsyth, Swamp Baron of the Calumet, for whom the Boulevard was originally named. Forsyth Avenue was changed to Indianapolis Boulevard in 1933 because businesspeople worried that travelers to the Chicago Worlds Fair would become disoriented if the highway had different names in different towns. For the teacher, the name change provides an opportunity to linger awhile with your student, exploring the Fair and developments surrounding it." Or take it back farther to Forsyth's connection to the railroads that cross the Region, or to the Great Fire that destroyed much of his northwest Indiana land, or to the genetic disease that afflicted Forsyth children. So that yesterday's news becomes connected, interesting, and relevant to today.

McKinlay's methods and methodologies are best understood in his own words:

In a 1979 letter to Warren Wiersbe, he wrote: "I'm working on the hypothesis that Indiana Harbor is the quintessential American community, the purest, most concentrated essence of twentieth century America. Absurd? A town that was a babel of tongues, rarely English, the All-American town? Well, let me put it this way: I think what happened in Indiana Harbor, starting in 1901, is what happened to America in the twentieth century, except it happened in Indiana Harbor in concentrated form, exaggerated, magnified, intensified to, at times, an almost comic degree. As you go along, I think you'll see this in the influx of what were then called Foreigners (85% foreign born), the invasion of missionaries, the development of institutions, especially the Big Three of Schools, Churches, and Saloons and their antecedents (inns) and spin-offs (gambling houses, brothels, banks, travel agencies, restaurants, etc. and the interrelationship among them, even the interdependence – especially banks and gambling houses, the latter providing the cash flow for the former)."

To Joe Biggot in 1982, he raised serious academic questions about the sociology of the area, how the nature of the place, and the backgrounds of the immigrants, forged something different . . . or did it? "For some time now I have been trying to define for myself the culture of the Calumet Region, without complete success. Do you think there is a distinct Calumet Region culture? It seems to me that when tens of thousands of Europeans – mostly eastern and southern Europeans – are translated into altogether different surroundings and into an American culture (circa 1880-1925) that a new culture should develop, especially since most of these people (peasants, mostly) were concentrated in a particular geographical area, South Chicago at first, then other communities of the Calumet region. Still, I haven't been able to define that culture, if there be one, to my satisfaction. Maybe it existed for a while and simply dissolved in the American culture. Maybe the second and third generation of immigrant progeny simply became like so many offspring of Ozzie and Harriet. I'd like to think not, but frankly I haven't been able to distinguish a Regionite and his or her culture from anyone else or any other mid-western culture. And yet I feel there is a difference. I'd be interested in your opinion."

In communications with Austin Boyle in 1980, he promoted the idea of publishing a scholarly periodical because: "The Calumet Region is now old enough to have a detectable pattern that has already been identified in some history books, but which has not been investigated in terms of the pieces of the pattern. And therein lies a great deal of interest, especially for people who live in or who have lived in the Calumet Region. . .

Apart from inherent interest, there's a perhaps deeper reason for inquiring into the history of the Calumet Region, and that is that people from "The Region" seem to generally hold themselves in lower esteem than people from other parts of the Chicago area. The reason for this may lie in the fact that Regionites know very little of their origins. They are, in many respects, rootless. The same impulse that impelled many Blacks to inquire into their African origins may, at a different level, be latently at work in the Calumet Region, and the people of it. So adding depth to Calumet Region history can be a very definite public service."

To Steve McShane in1989, referring to the Reejin Archetypes manuscript: "What I have written is not a textbook. It's well researched, but it is mock-serious. I treat Duh Reejin as if it were Camelot, a magical place that no longer exists, but one that we (the readers) are trying to recover. My objective in this, as in all I write about the Calumet Region, is to give people raised and living in the Calumet Region a sense of their heritage, without putting them to sleep. At the same time, I intend the writings to interest, inform, and entertain people not of or from the Calumet Region. While the book is historically based, it is intended to make reading about the Calumet Region fun. If it isn't fun, then it fails. Please flag any installments that don't bring a smile to your face, even a twisted smile."