JIMS SILO MINION CACHE
NO NIGHT CACHING PLEASE
THE CACHE IS BY THE ROAD
Kathy sat with her husband, Jim, in the yard of their family farm home in rural northeast Indiana, surrounded by fields of corn and beans, four and a half miles away from the nearest town, a small community that most people pass through only on their way to somewhere else.
The couple sipped cocktails and looked out across their quiet land, chatting about the weathered barn and rusted 25-foot tall grain silo that towered above them, how both desperately needed a fresh coat of paint.
Then Jim, with his creative mind and enthusiastic energy, turned to Kathy and announced his grand idea: what if they painted the silo like a minion?
The colors would be jarring against the earthy tones of backcountry Indiana, but the silo — squatty and domed — was just the right size. Like the rest of the world, the Starks had watched the movie “Despicable Me” and fell in love with the strange, mumbling yellow cartoons. So had their grandkids.
But the couple never acted. Winter was approaching. The paint job could wait.
Two months later, Jim died. He was 73.
It wasn’t until months later, after the first round of holidays without him had come and gone, that Kathy started entertaining her husband’s wacky idea. What if they painted the silo like a minion?
In February, she mentioned it to her daughter, Brandi Groth, then her stepson, Ryan Stark.
“Oh my God,” Kathy remembers her stepson saying. “Let’s do it.”
Jim’s silo had put Ossian on the map. It had become, in Kathy’s words, a “tourist” destination.
“I’m out here in the middle of nowhere causing traffic jams because of a minion,” she said. “There’s no way we could have dreamt this was going to be this big.”
I KNOW YOUR WATCHING DOWN THINKING WOW ALL THIS FOR ME
RIP JIM