Dan Combs had a way with words.
While I met him in the mid 70s as Jim Combs’ “little brother Danny,” I had no idea who he was when I read a letter to the editor he wrote in 1985. No environmentalist, Dan was not a fan of the group Citizens Concerned About PCBs, which arose to oppose Tomi Allison’s incinerator.
“Consider me a citizen concerned about Citizens Concerned About PCBs,” he wrote.
Charlotte Zietlow once wrote a letter criticizing my reportage at the Herald-Times for getting “caught up the colorful rhetoric of the Perry Township Trustee,” aka Carp Combs. For my writing about the poor, hungry, homeless, and disenfranchised, he said I covered the “misery beat.”
Well, I’m a man of words as well, and I’ve gotten pretty used to memorializing friends who have passed – Charlotte, James Alexander Thom, even Ken Nunn, who once sent a note calling me an “old friend.” I wrote a book about Andy Mahler and left his bedside just a few hours before he passed.
But when I learned the news on the morning of Jan. 6, all I could muster for our mutual Facebook Friends was:
“Sorry folks. But I just learned that Carp Combs passed this morning. This is a hard one.”
Environmentalism aside, Carp and I connected on so many levels, especially the political.
We were both contrarian politicos. In the Herald-Telephone/Times days, he spent so much time at my desk with tips and scoops, we should have given the future H-T columnist his own desk.
I was a newshound and investigative journalist and wrote very few feature stories in my 11 years at the H-T. But one I wrote in 1989 about catfishing with Carp Combs called ‘Strategic’ Fishing was the only one of the 2,500+ byline stories I wrote there that included my photo.
Our last contact was 2 1/2 weeks ago, when I posted a photocopy of ‘Strategic’ Fishing on Facebook, which was met with high praise.
“We three were such babes,” he commented, referring to the two of us and his son Levi. “I saved that story. It was well-written, and funny.”
Dan served as the Monroe County Democratic Party chair from 2003-05 and was re-elected Perry Trustee 10 times.
Literally until the end, he was one of my A-list go-to guys when I needed to be in the know.
For example, when I started driving Uber and noticed nearly every African American woman I talked to had moved here from Chicago to give her kids better lives, Carp explained the history of the change that made Section 8 housing vouchers portable.
We both loved and wrote about history.
I think our strongest bond was the misery beat thing, which, I’m proud to say, is my last historic recollection with and memory of Carp the man.
We both understood the poor and working class from life experience.
While I grew up comfortable and spoiled on East Side Indianapolis, I had two separate friends who, while they lived in new 60s-era working-class homes, did not have living room furniture. Two blocks away just south of 38th Street, neighbors parked their cars on grassless front yards.
Dan grew up deep in the hardscrabble Monroe County hills and hollers around Harrodsburg. The first time I went to his house, he lived in a trailer court.
Giving voice to the defenseless was a part of my work as a journalist. For Dan, it was his life mission, a fact that was driven home on a joint project we did together just last fall.
Canary in the Coal Mine is an oral history book that Dan and I published last September with his office and staff about the tornado that tore through their township last May.
Township trustees help low-income citizens survive short-term financial crises from, for example, illness or sudden job loss. They have no responsibility whatsoever to deal with victims of natural disasters, like tornadoes.
But Dan Combs responded instinctively when he learned that a tornado had twisted a path of devastation through his side of town on a Friday evening last May, destroying the Clear Creek Post Office and Economy Inn, a rent-by-the-week motel where many of his clients lived.
Carp went straight to the Inn on Friday, where he witnessed firsthand the bloody gore of a tornado that propelled a steel sink across a room and pinned a man by the shins to the floor.
“He pulled his pant leg up, and his calf was twice as big around as his thigh,” Carp said of a victim he encountered sitting on the motel’s sidewalk. “It was the most horrid, deep purple and green all the way around.”
Dan and Senior Caseworker Amanda Higgins set up a table at the temporary Red Cross shelter in Sherwood Oaks Christian Church, so they could identify who needed help and would be prepared the second the township doors opened on Monday.
A Red Cross woman told them they were the first public officials she had ever seen at a disaster shelter.
“By the time the Red Cross shelter closed on Tuesday,” Amanda told me, “Perry Township had found housing for everyone who had asked.”
The public servant that he was, Dan saw the Canary in the Coal Mine project as a public service to let people know that, in the age of climate change, there is no government agency at any level with any responsibility to help citizens when disaster strikes.
Monroe County Emergency Management’s role, the 40-year veteran of local government learned, is to assist FEMA and utility crews who are called during disasters that qualify for federal assistance. They do not respond to those in need.
Homeowners with insurance get help, he said. Low-income renters do not.
Dan sent copies of Canary in the Coal Mine to every local official and every state legislator to alert them to the system’s failure.
Amanda, who has worked in the social service field for 13 years, told me that even she was surprised that she and Dan were the only public officials on the scene in the tornado’s aftermath.
“But I wasn’t surprised that Dan did it,” she said, “because that’s how Dan is. That’s what he does.”
Yes, that’s what Dan Combs did. And no one will ever do it like he did, ever again.
I wish I would have reached out last week after running into Levi at Bloomington Hardware, but I figured it could wait.
Keep ‘em honest wherever you are, little brother Danny.
