ELWOOD HAYNES

October 14, 1857-April 13, 1925

For thirty-five years Elwood Haynes was a resident of Kokomo. The record of those years was one of fine achievement for himself and for this community. As the builder of America’s first commercially successful gasoline automobile, he linked Kokomo’s name enduringly with the motor vehicle industry. As the inventor of Stellite alloy and stainless steel, he gave the mechanical world two rustless materials of inestimable value. In the hearts of his fellow townsmen, however, Mr. Haynes was enshrined as a Christian gentlemen, a designation thoroughly deserved and universally accorded him.

—Mr. Haynes stands in front of the Kokomo house in which he spent the last years of his life reading the plaque dedicating him to his city, whose motto “The City of Firsts” is a direct result of his pursuits. Webster Street is empty and the sky is dark, as is usual in front of the house at four o’clock in the summer morning. Street lamps glow from high above the road, lighting Haynes’ homecoming. Looking up at his aging house, he sighs, then walks through the front door.

With a fragile smile, he roams the rooms and halls of his estate, browsing the relics of his past, finding pieces nostalgic to him, like family portraits, and others whose relevance have been fabricated by the curator. He laughs uneasily and, with ghoulish introspection, hovers to the screened patio porch at the rear of the house which stands atop a hill in Highland Park overlooking the geese wading and feeding at Wildcat Creek, the empty youth baseball diamonds that have been prepared for little league competition, and the red, wooden bridge that Mr. Haynes himself used to steer his horseless carriage across on his drive home.

The garage stands apart from the house, about 15 feet behind the porch, and never housed the automobile the Apperson Brothers built for him over the winter and spring of 1893-94—the invention he conceived as manager of a gas plant in Kokomo, and realized by purchasing a one-cylinder, one-horsepower engine to power his vision. He does not know that his house stands empty most of the time, home only to a fading past that goes unnoticed and unmentioned by the inhabitants of his home state with the exception of a handful of school children bored, yet glad to be out of the classroom. He also knows nothing of the development of the town whose industry he christened, whose economy he pulled in the direction of promise.

4:00 AM

Mr. Haynes haunts US 31, moving on the bypass between the large complexes that stand on each side of the highway, containing DaimlerChrysler Automotives on one side and Delphi Delco Electronics on the other. At such an early hour, the parking lots of these venues are still a third full with cars whose owners work the latest shift possible to support a family, or simply themselves. Haynes looks at the horseless carriages that sit upon advertising lifts near the Chrysler marquee—only the wheels made him realize what he was staring at. The sleekness startles him and he approaches with caution. Astounded by the advancement, Haynes stands neglectful of the idea that his innovations are responsible for such a machine. Traffic begins to pass him on the highway and Haynes watches with an intuitive eye the machines in action, hovering in his ghostly form feet above the road. The sight and sounds of the semi-trucks in the dark morning make Mr. Haynes shake with fear.

4:30 AM

Mr. Haynes has followed one of the Chrysler workers home from working the midnight shift. They had left early and Haynes, at this point, had become curious of the lifestyles of people who drive such incredible automobiles. He becomes bored after watching the fifty-some year old single woman walk from her car to her front door hunched over from the demands of working on an assembly line of a transmissions factory, shower slowly in a dirty bathtub to cleanse her from the grime and stench of factory work, and sit on the couch watching TV and rubbing Bengay into her hands and neck for nearly twenty minutes before she passes out with the lights on at five in the morning.

5:05 AM

Mr. Haynes visits the now condemned old Haynes Auto Co. Factory on Home Avenue, near the dwelling of the middle-aged woman he followed from the factory. He didn’t expect such an eyesore. The building is rotting, standing 7 stories and surrounded by chain-linked, barbed wire fencing—windows are broken and missing, and the once red brick façade is covered in dirt and grime, leaving a crumbling brown appearance. He haunts the polluted relic, looking about the cement flooring, finding dust and broken down machinery, greasy floors from oil products and chemicals left behind. The building is decaying with the stench of chemical contamination, but Mr. Haynes knows nothing of this. He is sobered by the deterioration of his legacy, long bankrupt and destroyed, after experiencing the advancements of his invention, watching the 20th-century, stylized cars gliding along the highway.

5:36 AM

He has come to examine the old Stellite factory, sitting near the bank of the Wildcat Creek, a tributary of the Wabash River that runs through central Indiana. The aging chemical pollution lines the walls, ceilings and floors of the factory similar to his auto company, soaking into the soil, contaminating the ground and the creek. The smokestacks are still soaked with the stale smell of coal after decades of disuse, and the broken windows and faded façade of this factory loom high over the pothole-ridden Kokomo roads. Nothing is sacred, Haynes thinks while brooding over the browned body of water that once held a vital importance to Miami Indians who inhabited Howard County before it was purchased by settlers, and that still holds importance to the local water and sewage companies.

6:10 AM

The sun rises and Haynes evaporates with industrious negligence for the after-effects of the prospering of Kokomo, returning from where he came, as morning-shift workers eat their breakfasts with prospects of another tiring day, as factory owners from Germany land in airplanes in the state’s capital to travel to Kokomo and find ways to manufacture their products less expensively (and who are soon to decide that lay-offs will instigate a larger profit margin), and as pollutants drain off into the Wildcat Creek and run downstream into the Wabash.

by Ryan Wilcox