Microsoft Edge fills its base page with clickbait. I haven’t managed to turn it off yet**, so I’m irresistibly clicking. This story caught my attention because I visited Muncie in 1968 while campaigning for Gene McCarthy. I remember Muncie as a pretty place, with an especially wonderful park by the river.
I learned several things from this story!
(1) Muncie residents are called Munsonians.
(2) Indiana had an oil boom before Oklahoma did.
(3) A Latvian immigrant who adopted the name of George Roberts got rich first by salvaging the leftovers of the oil drillers, then by staking the drillers. He built a fancy hotel much like Spokane’s Davenport, and the hotel ran through the same history. Vacant for a long time, finally restored and repurposed in the last decade.
(4) Roberts couldn’t sit still and enjoy his wealth in Muncie. He had to chase bigger money in the Oklahoma boom, then lost it all in 1929 and died broke.
(5) But his grandsons Henry Kravis and George Roberts III regained the wealth in a much less productive way. KKR invented the LBO, which has now destroyed thousands of honest businesses.
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** Irrelevant footnote: Edge uses the MS chatbot for its help functions. When I searched for ways to make a blank New Tab page, the chatbot gave authoritatively wrong information. The current version of Edge doesn’t have the tabs and choices confidently specified by the chatbot, so there’s no way to apply the steps. In other words, Edge’s own chatbot doesn’t know how Edge works. (Maybe the info was valid for an earlier version.)
Polistra's Mill 