Indiana Facts

A former Marine pilot in Peru, Indiana, bought a Vietnam-era Army Huey on eBay. The listing said it was not flyable. It was trailered 1,300 miles home from Maine, volunteers rebuilt it, and in 2007 it flew again. The nonprofit he and his brother started now flies three Hueys and has given more than 23,000 rides. The crew says a veteran is reunited with a Huey at every event.

A cornhusking contest was a race to strip corn by hand, timed to the minute. In 1935, one of those contests drew 110,000 people to a cornfield in Newtown, Indiana. Two aerial bombs marked its start and finish, eighty minutes apart. Elmer Carlson of Iowa husked about 41½ bushels of corn by hand and won. NBC broadcast the whole contest live on national radio. Farmers still compete for the same title every October.

The underdog gym from the movie Hoosiers is real. Knightstown, Indiana raised $14,400 to build it in 1921. It closed in 1966 and nearly got torn down in 1988. The 1986 film had already made it famous. Two preservation groups stepped in and saved it. Real high school teams still play real games there. More than 80 a year. It never stopped being a real gym.

A construction foreman in South Bend, Indiana, was building a new wing for a children's hospital. Patients on the sixth floor looked down on his site. So he cut a giant Where's Waldo out of plywood, his daughter helped paint it, and he hid it among the scaffolding. Every time a child spotted Waldo, the foreman moved him somewhere new.