TERRE HAUTE, Ind. (AP) _ Timothy McVeigh may soon be put to death at the federal prison here, but Rod Henry won't speak of an execution _ he just calls it a "federal event."
The head of the city's Chamber of Commerce knows thousands of people might be filling his city's hotel rooms, restaurant booths and barstools to report on and demonstrate against the Oklahoma City bomber's execution. But he doesn't like to mention the federal penitentiary, or its adjacent one-story, red-brick execution chamber.
Since the execution was scheduled in January, Terre Haute has been walking a delicate line between downplaying McVeigh's death and trying to capitalize on the vast attention it is bringing.
Henry talks freely about the historic covered bridges to the north, and the Wabash River that winds past parks in this city of 60,000. He notes the seemingly endless string of stores and restaurants that line this college town's main thoroughfare.
Still, businesses finally are beginning to see profits for an event that was postponed in May and seemed unsure to happen until McVeigh decided not to appeal to the Supreme Court.
At Buffalo Wild Wings, a steak restaurant 10 minutes from the prison, manager Bryan Moon said he has seen more customers, most sporting media badges.
But last month's postponement appeared to prompt a sudden case of conscience in Jim Handlin, a retired car salesman criticized for selling T-shirts that depicted McVeigh's lethal injection by showing a dripping hypodermic needle and the words "Hoosier Hospitality."
Handlin said he doesn't plan to sell shirts this weekend. "It's over with as far as I'm concerned," he said.
That's not the case for other businesses in town, where capitalism is thriving. Roughly 30 dozen similar shirts, priced at $21, have sold at Body Art Ink, a downtown tattoo and piercing shop. The shirts feature a mock newspaper bearing the headlines "Die, Die, Die" and "Hangin' Time."
A shirt demanding the government "Stop the Killing" and "Let McVeigh Live" is less popular. "We've only sold six of those," said Adele Rogers.
Henry, the Chamber head, said there is no plan to estimate how much money the McVeigh execution will pump into the city's economy.
"We could sit down and work up the numbers, but we're not going to," he said. "Because it's going to get misinterpreted. They're going to say, 'Terre Haute is profiting."'
Despite the grim nature of the exposure Terre Haute is getting, an execution likely will help the city in the long run, said Allistair Morrison, director of Purdue University's Tourism and Hospitality Research Center.
"I think the kind of negative image that comes with it in the short term also will bring about some positives in the future, because it does give a level of notoriety to the city," Morrison said. "Not necessarily all positive, but it does put it on people's cognitive maps as a place. People want to go to places where historic things happened."
Tourists visit the sites of deadly bank robberies, historic battlefields and even the place where the guillotine once stood in Paris, he said. So why not the site where one of the nation's most notorious criminals _ responsible for the deaths of 168 people, including 19 children _ met his demise?
Still, that's not what Henry and others at the Chamber of Commerce have in mind.
"The thing we've got to do is just encourage the whole community to put forth Terre Haute's best during this time," he said.
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APTV 06-09-01 1625MDT
