| 5/16/2007 3:00:00 PM | Email this article • Print this article |
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| HONORED FOR PROMOTING MADISON: Lt. Gov. Becky Skillman, right, presents Bob Cline with the Lieutnant Governor’s Hoosier Hospitality Award for his Web site that promotes tourism in the Madison area. Accepting the award with Cline is his wife, Rita. (Submitted photo) |
| | Local hospitality award will be presented today | The annual Madison-Jefferson County Hospitality Award will be presented at 5 p.m. today in the City Council chamber at City Hall. There will be light refreshments afterward.
The award, presented by the Madison Area Convention and Visitors Bureau, is given during Tourism Week.
The presentation is open to the public.
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Cline gets Hospitality Award for promoting Madison
Peggy Vlerebome
Courier Staff Writer
When Bob Cline retired 16 years ago after a career in law enforcement, he and his wife moved to Madison because they had always liked it when they were growing up in Osgood, and they had never been anywhere they liked better. They had learned to swim at Crystal Beach in 1940 and got married at Trinity Methodist Church in Madison in 1948 when he was an Indiana State Police trooper on his way up the ranks to full colonel.
The next time he retired, after seven years as the police chief at Hanover College in the security department he founded, he combined a love of Madison and his recently learned knowledge about how to make Web pages. He made them the hard way, using the computer language HTML rather than the easier Web-creation programs.
He started a Web site to tell people as close as next door and as far as continents away about Madison, where to go and what to do, show them pictures of people they'd recognize, keep them updated about the Miss Madison hydroplane, inform them when the paddlewheel boats would be visiting and provide links to local businesses and other Madison-related sites.
He used a takeoff on the title of a movie about his beloved hometown to name his Web site www.Madisoncamerunning.com.
Tuesday, his friend and ISP trooper Nat Adams, whose parents still live in Madison, drove Bob and Rita Cline in a patrol car from Madison to Indianapolis, where Lt. Gov. Becky Skillman presented a Lieutenant Governor's Hoosier Hospitality Award to Cline for his Web site's role in promoting tourism in the Madison area.
"We're pleased that Madison Came Running received some kind of hello up there," Cline said after returning home from Indianapolis and posting a picture from the awards ceremony on his Web site.
Cline, 81, spends at least two to three hours a day working on his Web site, trying to add something new every day. He encourages visitors to go beyond the first page they reach, because deeper into the site is where they will find the pictures he takes walking around town, including photos of a house on Elm Street that changes color depending on how the light strikes it.
Another part of the site has his memoirs, where he tells about his 34-year career with the Indiana State Police; about being the first director of criminal investigations at the then-new Indiana Department of Environmental Management; and about getting a two-year certificate from Indiana University's Criminal Law Institute in 1947 and a degree in sociology from IU East in 1983. He, his daughter and his granddaughter among them have seven degrees from IU, which named him a Distinguished Alumni in 1999.
Responding to site visitor requests for information about the new Miss Madison, he takes two or three pictures of it every other day and puts them on his Web site, even though he can't see much change yet as the boat is prepared to join the racing circuit. His site also has pictures of the Miss Madison going back to before it won the Governor's Cup.
Another section has pictures of houses whose owners he doesn't identify; he just posts pictures of houses downtown for people to enjoy, much as they would if they were driving around. He takes pictures of people and puts them on his site with just a one-word description, no full captions, because people who visit his site will recognize them.
For nine years he has been at work on his Web site. What his Web site doesn't have, he said, is a political agenda, except for his occasional jabs at something going on that he said, chuckling, usually rile the mayor. His site is all about downtown, not the hilltop, because downtown is what the tourists visit and want to know about, and downtown is where local people - whether they still live in Madison or another state - relate to. That "gets me in trouble," he said.
His Web site satisfies curiosity, but it also has raised his own curiosity. Every day, someone in Nagasaki, Japan, visits the site, and he doesn't know who it is. He knows who his regular site visitors from Stuttgart, Germany, are because they are students of "Some Came Running" and visited Madison to see all the places where scenes in the movie were filmed.
Cline is well-traveled, from his time in the Army Air Corps in World War II to when he traveled the state for the ISP, but nowhere has ever had the appeal of Madison.
"I really love Madison," he said.
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Reader Comments
Posted: Wednesday, May 16, 2007
Article comment by:
Paul Glowiak
Well deserved award! Congratulations, Bob.
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