Merrillville, Indiana

One of the great untold stories in American music starts in a Gary record shop. Vivian Carter was a Gary radio personality who, with her husband James Bracken, ran Vivian's Record Shop. In 1953 they launched their own label and named it from their initials, V and J: Vee-Jay Records. Founded here in Gary and soon based up in Chicago, Vee-Jay grew into the most successful Black-owned record company in America before Motown. Its roster was staggering: the bluesmen Jimmy Reed and John Lee Hooker, the gospel of the Staple Singers, a young Curtis Mayfield with the Impressions, even the pop hitmakers the Four Seasons. And then came the moment almost nobody remembers. When the giant Capitol Records passed on an unknown British band, little Vee-Jay said yes. In 1963 it became the first American company to release the Beatles, and it put out their first U.S. album, called Introducing the Beatles. So before the British Invasion swept the country, the Beatles first reached America through a label born in a Gary record store. (Sources: Encyclopedia of Chicago; Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.)

Over in Gary's Miller neighborhood, on South Lake Street, a big mural celebrates the brothers who turned this steel town into a music legend: the Jackson 5. The full family that came out of one small Gary house is almost unbelievable, Michael, Janet, Jermaine, Jackie, Tito, Marlon, and more. But here is a record that still stuns. When the five brothers signed with Motown, their first four national singles, I Want You Back, ABC, The Love You Save, and I'll Be There, every single one of them shot to number one on the pop chart. No group had ever launched its career with four straight chart-toppers like that. The little two-bedroom house where they rehearsed is the quiet shrine a few blocks away; this bright mural is the loud, public thank-you, the city's way of putting its proudest sound up on a wall for everyone to see. (Source: city of Gary.)

For one of the most unexpected meals in Gary, you don't go downtown, you go out by the interstate, to a little spot called the Balkan Grill Company, run out of a truck-stop location. It was opened by a Serbian immigrant named Momcilo Bogdanovic, a former truck driver himself, who got sick of the sad, reheated food that truckers were stuck eating on the road. So he decided to cook them the real thing instead. The menu is straight from the Balkans: cevapi, those little grilled minced-meat sausages, hearty stews, and the showstopper, the gurmanska pljeskavica, a big seasoned meat patty stuffed with cheese and ham and tucked into warm Balkan flatbread. It is the kind of honest, made-to-order food a hungry driver dreams about, hiding in plain sight at a Gary truck stop. (Source: Balkan Grill Company.)

Boosters called Gary the Magic City, a whole town conjured out of the dunes by U.S. Steel. But the magic was built on brutal work. Inside Gary Works, men commonly pulled twelve-hour shifts, seven days a week, in heat and danger. In September 1919, Gary's steelworkers joined a nationwide strike, demanding shorter hours and the right to a union. The city became one of the strike's flashpoints. Tension boiled over between strikers, police, and the replacement workers brought in to break them. When the local and state forces could not hold order, the federal government sent in the U.S. Army. About a thousand troops marched into Gary in October, a force that swelled toward four thousand, and their commander declared martial law over the city. U.S. Steel simply refused to bargain, and the great strike collapsed without winning its demands. The company would not even grant the eight-hour day until 1923. So the same planned streets the promoters bragged about had, for a few weeks, soldiers patrolling them, the hidden cost of the Magic City. (Sources: Encyclopedia of Chicago; Indiana University.)

The first human being ever to fly all the way around the moon was born right here in Gary. Frank Borman came into the world in this steel town in 1928. He grew up to become an Air Force pilot and then a NASA astronaut, and in December 1968 he commanded one of the boldest missions ever attempted: Apollo 8. Until that flight, no human had ever left Earth's gravity to circle another world. Borman, along with Jim Lovell and William Anders, rode their spacecraft a quarter million miles out and looped around the moon ten times, the first crew to see its far side and the first to watch the Earth rise over the lunar horizon, a photograph that changed how people saw our planet. It was a daring dress rehearsal that made the moon landing possible just seven months later. Not bad for a kid from Gary, Indiana. (Source: NASA.)