10 Things Hoosiers Do That Confuse Everyone Who Moves to Indiana

A new neighbor in Kokomo accepts an invitation to a pitch-in and turns up carrying nothing but a bottle of wine.

Nobody says a word.

Many Hoosiers would sooner let you work it out than embarrass you over an empty casserole dish.

These are the habits Hoosiers never explain to the people who move to Indiana.

1. Asking Which Time You Mean

Hoosiers pin down the time zone before they’ll agree to a meeting, and newcomers hear that as a joke until they miss one.

It’s a fair question.

Indiana runs on two clocks: Twelve counties keep Central time while the other 80 keep Eastern.

Six of them sit up by the Chicago line.

The other six sit down around Evansville.

So a Hoosier driving from Evansville to Indianapolis loses an hour, and you get it back on the way home.

Indiana skipped daylight saving for decades and only started moving its clocks statewide in 2006.

Set a call for two o’clock without saying whose two o’clock, and somebody sits alone.

2. Buying Beer Warm on Purpose

A transplant fills their cart at the grocery store, grabs a case of beer, and finds every bottle of it warm.

Indiana is the only state that sets rules for how cold beer can be when a store sells it.

Grocery stores, pharmacies, and gas stations can stack the shelves as high as they want.

It has to be warm.

Cold beer belongs to package liquor stores.

Wine gets a pass, which is a strange thing to explain to somebody standing in the aisle with a bag of ice.

Sunday carryout sales stayed illegal statewide until March 2018.

The Sunday hours still run noon to 8 p.m.

3. Ordering a Pork Tenderloin Sandwich

Newcomers order the pork tenderloin sandwich expecting tenderloin, and that’s the first thing they get wrong.

Cooks start with a pork loin, pound it thin, hand-bread it, and fry it until it hangs well past the bread on every side.

The bun’s right there.

You eat the overhang first, work your way in, and meet the bread somewhere near the end.

Nick’s Kitchen in Huntington has served them since 1908, and Hoosiers call it the birthplace of the pork tenderloin sandwich.

The Indiana Foodways Alliance, a statewide nonprofit, runs a Tenderloin Lovers Trail with more than 75 restaurants on it.

Most menus list the sandwich without a word about the size.

4. Filling Their High School Gyms

Newcomers who learned Indiana basketball from the movie Hoosiers assume the tournament in it still runs.

Indiana ran a single-class state tournament for most of a century, so a farm-town school could face a school ten times its size.

Milan did exactly that in 1954, beating Muncie Central 32-30, and the state’s own historical marker puts the crowd that poured into town afterward at roughly 40,000 people.

Then the rules changed.

Indiana’s high school athletic association split the tournament into four classes by enrollment in 1998, which closed the door on that kind of run.

The gyms didn’t shrink, and many across the state still seat several thousand people who turn up on a February Friday.

Hoosiers have argued about the split ever since.

5. Driving Carmel’s Roundabouts

Transplants meet their first roundabout north of Indianapolis and come to a full stop at the entrance, waiting on a signal that isn’t there.

Hoosiers yield and go.

Carmel has built more than 160 roundabouts, more than any other city in the country, and highway engineers keep adding them on state routes and county roads.

Drivers grumbled at first.

Then the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety studied 64 of those conversions and found injury crashes dropped 47%.

The double-teardrop design near the fast roads did better still, at 84%.

Locals slide through without touching the brakes.

6. Treating May as a Holiday

A newcomer writes the Indianapolis 500 on the calendar as one Sunday afternoon.

Practice runs, qualifying days, a downtown parade, and a stack of festivals fill the weeks before a single car takes the green flag on Memorial Day weekend.

One Sunday doesn’t cover it.

The 500 Festival Mini-Marathon alone sends thousands of runners through a 2.5-mile lap of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

Nobody voted on what happens on race day, and everybody follows it anyway.

A singer leads the crowd in the grandstands through “(Back Home Again in) Indiana” before the engines start.

Then the winner celebrates with milk instead of champagne, which is the detail transplants never see coming.

That habit stuck after Louis Meyer drank buttermilk in Victory Lane in 1936.

7. Inviting You to a Pitch-In

An invitation to a pitch-in goes out, and the newcomers on the block read it as a plain dinner party.

A pitch-in is a potluck.

Hoosiers use the word without thinking, and hardly anyone in the state hears it as a regionalism at all.

So the family that answers “sure, we’ll be there” and brings nothing finds out at the serving table.

The vocabulary keeps going.

Hoosiers sweep the carpet when they mean vacuum it, and they say “ope” while squeezing past your cart in an aisle.

Directions come with catty-corner dropped in, as though that settles it.

None of it arrives with a footnote, and a newcomer who asks for a translation gets a puzzled beat first.

8. Serving Pie With No Fruit

Hoosiers hand newcomers a slice of sugar cream pie and call it the state pie, which isn’t quite right.

The Indiana Senate passed a nonbinding resolution in 2009, so the title has been unofficial the whole time.

Nobody in Indiana cares.

The pie is cream, sugar, butter, and vanilla, thickened right in the shell and dusted with nutmeg on top.

There’s no fruit in it anywhere, which is the part that stalls a first-timer at the table.

Quaker families from North Carolina carried the recipe into east central Indiana in the early 1800s, which is why Winchester, Portland, and Richmond all claim a share of it.

Wick’s Pies over in Winchester turns out about 12 million pies and pie shells a year.

Sugar cream outsells everything else the bakery makes, and those pies ship to 25 states.

Pass on a slice at a Hoosier’s table, and somebody offers it to you again ten minutes later.

9. Claiming Chicago as Home

Somebody from Indiana's northwest corner tells a newcomer they're from Chicago, and the state never comes up.

They mean the Region.

Families in Lake and Porter counties watch Chicago television, root for Chicago teams, and drive over the state line for work.

People from that corner call themselves Region Rats, a nickname the Indiana Historical Society traces to the steel mills and refineries at the top of Lake County.

Nobody agrees where the Region starts.

The historical society put the question to five of its own staffers and came away without a settled boundary.

So a family in Valparaiso saying they live outside Chicago is telling the truth, and a Hoosier down in Bloomington who overhears it rolls their eyes anyway.

10. Lighting Fireworks for Eleven Days

Anyone who moves to Indiana in the spring gets a jolt in late June, when the neighbors start setting off fireworks and don't quit.

State lawmakers protected a stretch from June 29 through July 9 that no city ordinance can shorten.

That's eleven straight days.

Inside that stretch, Hoosiers can light fireworks from 5 p.m. until two hours after sunset, and the Fourth of July itself runs from 10 a.m. until midnight.

State law otherwise allows fireworks from 9 a.m. to 11 p.m., and from 9 a.m. to midnight on state holidays.