In his unpublished memoir Jazzbanders, Hoagy said of his hometown, “Bloomington offered everything. Creeks, ponds, rabbits, circuses and wide open spaces. I could cross a dusty street here in my bare feet without the aid of a traffic cop.” The Carmichaels lived close to the IU campus. As a boy Hoagy played baseball in the summer and football in autumn on Dunn Meadow.
According to his account (as reported in Sudhalter’s Stardust Melody), Hoagy's breakthrough as a pianist came one rainy summer day. He was home in the family parlor after his baseball game on Dunn Meadow had been cancelled. The sound of the bells in the IU clock tower playing “Hail to Old I.U.” struck his ears. Suddenly he began to pick out the tune on his mother’s piano. Although he had heard his mother play all of his young life, this was the first time it occurred to him to try playing it himself. His mother had not wanted to impose her interest on the boy. However, when she discovered his own passion and aptitude for the instrument she was thrilled and began teaching him the keyboard. From this point on, Hoagy’s love of music grew apace. The rained-out baseball game on Dunn Meadow proved to be a blessing in disguise!
]]>The house on Dunn Street is one of several homes where the Carmichael family lived during Hoagy’s childhood. Born in Bloomington on November 22, 1899, Howard Hoagland was the first child and only son of Howard Clyde (“Cyclone”) and Mary Lida Robison Carmichael. Three girls were to follow. The youngest of them, Joanne, died when she was three, much to her brother’s distress. He blamed her death on the family’s poverty and wrote on the back of a photo of her that her loss made him vow, “I would never be broke again in my lifetime.”
Cyclone Carmichael held a number of jobs, none of which seemed to last long or pay well. He periodically uprooted the family in pursuit of better opportunities. In 1904 they moved to Indianapolis but were back in Bloomington two years later. A more dramatic move came in 1910 when Cyclone transported the family to Missoula, Montana. It was a vast, cold, and sparsely populated area that ten-year-old Hoagy found bleak and forbidding. As his eldest son Hoagy Bix later recounted, however, the boy discovered that Black musicians played hot ragtime on pianos in local brothels. Hoagy would steal there to listen to them, without his mother’s knowledge. By spring 1911, much to Hoagy’s relief, his father’s Montana dream had ended. The family was back in Bloomington, first at the Dunn Street house again and then at 325 South Fess Avenue, just two blocks away.
Hoagy’s mother Lida was a skilled pianist. She supplemented the family income by playing at silent movie theaters as well as fraternity and sorority parties on the IU campus, frequently accompanied by her son. Hoagy didn’t reveal a special interest in music, however, until he was eleven years old. He claims he became fascinated with the song “Little Boy Blue” and asked his mother to teach him to sing it. She later taught him to play the piano as well. Their mutual love of music became a lifelong bond between Hoagy and Lida.
In 1916 Cyclone Carmichael once again moved the family to Indianapolis. This disrupted the social and musical life Hoagy, now in high school, had begun to enjoy. He dropped out of Manual High School in Indianapolis when he was sixteen. He then worked a series of jobs on a construction crew, assembly line, and, most grimly, in a slaughterhouse. In early 1919, at the age of eighteen, Hoagy returned to Bloomington. He lived with his Robison grandparents at 907 Atwater St., and re-entered high school, from which he finally graduated in 1920.
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