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http://www.blackplanet.com/Charlie_Wiggins/

Charlie Wiggins grew up in a segregated Evansville. The KKK had come to power in Indiana and in 1924 would win every elected office at the state level. D.C. Stephenson, the head and organizing force of the Klan, was an Evansville resident. There was even talk of building a city on an Ohio River island for whites only. The city’s newspapers at that time were blatantly racist and even held a contest to name the new city. Negro League baseball players, banned from white-only organized baseball, while playing exhibitions games here, called the attitudes of southern Indiana more racist than areas in the Deep South. Charlie Wiggins was a downtown Evansville shoeshine boy in those days and was fascinated with the relatively new automobiles that were coming to town. He would entertain his customers by identifying the make and model of cars by simply hearing the motors as they drove down the street. With a stroke of luck he was shining shoes outside an auto repair shop when the owner offered him a job as an apprentice. Quickly, Charlie rose to chief mechanic and became recognized as the best mechanic in the city. He would often diagnose the car’s problem just by listening to the car engine. Indiana’s heritage was rich and played a significant role in the development of the automotive industry. In Indianapolis, there were hundreds of makes and models being manufactured. Charlie realized that greater opportunity lay in Indianapolis and he and his wife, Roberta, whom the newspapers described as a ‘fetching Evansville model’,