TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/100989/10098900.046

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 13.7 KB | 260 lines

                                                                                NATION, Page 30

A Tapestry of Prairie Life


In Greenfield, Iowa, the Sidey family paper celebrates its
centennial. Can rural culture -- and the values it nourishes for
America -- survive another century?

By Hugh Sidey


    A new sign in stately Old English letters has been hung up
on the worn red brick building, the leaky roof has been
repaired, and the staff has thumbed gingerly through crumbling
back issues, gathering fragments of history to print again. The
Adair County Free Press of Greenfield, Iowa, is just about ready
for its 100th birthday next week. Same newspaper, same family
of editors, no sellout to a chain, no fortunes made or lost,
circulation steady at 3,200 in a county of 9,500 and a town of
2,200. The back issues form a tapestry of small events, a
century of stories of children's birthdays, club meetings, 4-H
calves, men and women going off to war and, always, the terrors
and joys of the Great Prairie weather. Good people, good earth,
both granted dignity and meaning on the pages of a tiny paper.

    Editor and publisher Ed Sidey, my brother, will drape a
wisp of bunting over the new sign, print a modest centennial
edition and later hold a small open house with coffee and
cookies and a lot of laughter. Then he and his crew of nine will
begin the work of the second century.

    "Will the paper be around another 100 years?" he wonders.
"Will the town be recognizable in 2089?" He thinks so, but he
is troubled. So are all the people who still make up a rural
culture of farms and small towns from the Appalachians to the
Rockies, for all of our history a taproot that nourished the
other branches. The crisis of the farms themselves has passed
for now, but around Greenfield's town square the economic strain
has worsened. A hardware store, a drugstore, a grocery store,
a Ford dealership have all closed within three years. County
residents are lured to the shopping centers of Des Moines, 60
miles east over smooth highways they helped build.

    A Wal-Mart is going up in Creston, 20 miles away, and
Greenfield's merchants fear the worst. Wall Street traders will
hail America's richest man, Sam Walton, and his relentless
retailing march across the country. But Walton's new store,
dropped in a field of asphalt (one of 1,400 in his discount
empire) will suck a bit more of the commercial life out of
Greenfield and similar towns in the same radius. Another
comfortable old building with arched windows and high ceilings
may have to be padlocked. Not so long ago they were all open,
and the square filled up on Saturday night, when neighbors came
to buy and gossip. Prices were less important then than people.
A caring society thrived there and helped to sustain the values
that politicians now like to talk about as they see order and
meaning melt away in urban complexes.

    The rural culture was never as kindly and not always as
pleasant as legend would have it. But necessity forced a
concern for family and community and an interdependence that as
often as not subdued meanness and selfishness. A certain virtue
and hope were required for survival.

    "A human community, if it is to last long, must exert a
sort of centripetal force, holding local soil and local memory
in place," Kentucky farmer-philosopher Wendell Berry told Iowans
last year in a lecture on the work of local culture. "Country
people more and more live like city people, and so connive in
their own ruin. More and more country people, like city people,
allow their economic and social standards to be set by
television and salesmen and outside experts."

    Berry's view is that if nothing is done to preserve rural
culture, we will lose, as a nation, "the continuity of
attention and devotion without which the human life of the earth
is impossible." An extreme view, perhaps, but surely an echo of
Thomas Jefferson, who warned that successful democracy required
people with a sense of place, a closeness to the land.

    Will the Free Press centennial mark in its own small way
the end of the idealized "heartland," a century crammed roughly
between the bookends of homesteading and the ascendance of
television tastes?

    For those 100 years the heartland story was told by the
Free Press. The paper was founded by my grandfather and my
great-grandfather as the Adair County Democrat. One of the
earliest notes was about Grandfather: "If the Democrat is not
up to the standard this week our readers will excuse it as the
editor has gone to Canada to marry and left the office in charge
of the devil." Marriage apparently had its effect. In a few
years Grandfather served in the Iowa legislature, switched to
the Republican Party, changed the name of the paper. He never
missed a chuckle. Item: "Charley Overholt says if the price of
corn does not advance before planting time, he will raise white
beans instead and sell them to the school boys for marbles."
Item: "All the sick so far as we know are much better. Dr.
Crosby is a dandy, professionally, of course we mean."

    The crops flourished, the kids played marbles with clay
commies and glassies. War intruded. Note from Nov. 21, 1918:
"Mrs. Earl McCreight received a daisy blossom from Dr. G.H.
McCreight, who is with the U.S. Army in France this week. It
came all the way in a letter and was in good condition." Rural
culture was in wonderful bloom. Already, though, the tractor,
which would replace men in the fields, and the automobile, which
would carry away the young folks, were making inroads in the
society. By 1920 the population of Adair County had fallen by
2,000 from its peak of 16,000 in 1900. Deceptively, the town's
population went up about 400, so few worried.

    My mother came in 1923, on the train from Sioux City that
was pulled by a stout little locomotive called the Cumberland
Rose. She was a schoolteacher. When asked today why she stayed,
she says simply, "It was enough." There were ladies' clubs, the
church choir, a hat store, bobsleds, walnut gathering, dances,
two department stores, four grocery stores, plays at the Opera
House, a county fair and young men home from the war. One of
them would be my father Kenneth Sidey.

    He went off to the University of Missouri to study
journalism. At the end of the first year, he got a wire from
Grandfather telling him that because of the farm depression of
1920, the family had taken his college savings to rescue the
Free Press. He would have to come home. He did, and spent the
rest of his life on the paper.

    Writing the story of the land and people was enough. He set
up his huge Graflex in the middle of Depot Street one evening
to photograph the grain elevator gloriously in flames. He parked
his Ford in a cut made by a snowplow after one of the blizzards
of 1936. The picture showed the snowbanks piled around the car.
Every farmer with a crazy scheme to kill the swarms of
grasshoppers that came with the drought got his ear. On a
scorching day he watched one farmer race around his pasture with
a scoop fixed on the front of a Model A. The man dumped the
collected hoppers in a pile, sprayed oil on them and
triumphantly set them ablaze. Father, knowing the futility of
the effort, still murmured his appreciation of such energy and
ingenuity, wrote the facts down in his little notebook. Story
printed with picture.

    When one turns the old pages, the start of World War II is
clearly marked. Every contingent of draftees was lined up in
front of the Trailways bus that would take them to camp. Their
pictures were snapped, their names and the names of their
parents faithfully recorded. In the fading volumes those placid,
strong young faces form a continuing gallery.

    I learned the printing trade in those years and also the
discipline of small-town culture, so burdensome to Minnesota
writer Sinclair Lewis but only occasionally irritating to me.
I often took my place feeding the ink-caked flatbed press that
would lunge back and forth printing the pages. Each press run
took nearly three hours, sheet by sheet. There was no escape.
All eyes bored into my back. Patience was required,
craftsmanship demanded, good humor expected. On hot summer
nights, after taking the papers to the post office, I would
stand with my Uncle John at the makeup stone, and we would throw
the old lead back into the scoops to be remelted and used again.
We would sip Pepsis and talk about printing and people. It was
better than school.

    On winter nights when the icy west wind swept the town, I
sometimes halted on my post office run to talk to Russell Piper
in his tiny dry-cleaning plant. The steam and heat built up a
coat of ice an inch or more thick on the windows. He was a
shadowy figure behind the glacial facade. But he offered a cup
of hot chocolate and unquenchable cheer, even working through
the night cleaning other people's grease spots. Rural culture
lived through the war.

    The Free Press, with my brother at the helm, rode the ups
and downs of the postwar world. For a while it looked as if
Greenfield would grow dramatically. New houses went up by the
score. Cattle and hog prices climbed. Grain prices soared as a
hungry world sought aid. Chemical fertilizers hyped the yields.
New machines snorted through the thick fields. Norman Lear, the
movie producer, came around in 1969 to use the Greenfield square
as a setting for his film Cold Turkey. The Free Press went
Hollywood with relish, interviewing Bob Newhart, Dick Van Dyke
and Tom Poston. That was before the Dutch elm disease decimated
the leafy canopy over the square and left the side streets with
sunstroke. Greenfield folks watched in shock as the massive
elms, more than 100 years old, were cut down and hauled away.
But immediately stories began to appear in the Free Press of
tree-planting programs and parties. The rural society would heal
itself once again.

    Greenfield is still rallying. Almost weekly the paper runs
a story about plans for community regeneration, the hopes for
some industry to join the three small plants there now. The
water supply has been upgraded with new wells and a reservoir,
a campaign is under way to build an air museum for 17 antique
planes collected by a local flyer. Yet in the midst of this
flurry there is the vague feeling of something happening to the
nation that is bigger and more menacing than anything the rural
culture has faced before. It is economic. It is also spiritual.

    The troubled plains states to the west -- cousins of the
prairie states -- have been studied by demographers and land
planners, and the preliminary findings are stunning. Frank and
Deborah Popper of Rutgers University predict, "During the next
generation, as a result of the largest, longest-running
agricultural and environmental miscalculation in the nation's
history, much of the Plains will become almost totally
depopulated. The Federal Government should begin to convert vast
stretches of the region to a use so old it predates the American
presence -- a `Buffalo Commons' of native grass and livestock."
That will happen, insist the Poppers, because limited water was
squandered to irrigate land that never should have been plowed
to grow crops that were in surplus. As water runs out, both
below and above the surface, as soil continues to blow away, a
collapse of some sort is inevitable. The plainsmen who cling
stubbornly to their windy reaches are outraged, and the argument
is rumbling over the horizons. It echoes oddly around
Greenfield's square, for misfortune in the plains could help
Iowa.

    If water shortages force an end to irrigated grain, Adair
County, with its abundant rainfall and spongy soil, could gain
economically. Further, a new study by the National Academy of
Sciences urges the Government to structure its crop programs to
move farmers away from the heavy use of pesticides, animal
drugs and synthetic fertilizers, applications increasingly
condemned by consumers. That study found that yields from more
natural farming could be economically competitive. Farms with
diversified crops and animals, rotated fields and natural
fertilizers could be smaller and more labor-intensive,
encouraging farm families to stay put.

    One of the farmers cited in the NAS report as a good
example of the new/old methods is Clark BreDahl of Adair
County. "(BreDahl's) case study illustrates that a family can
still make a living today on a 160-acre diversified farm in
Iowa,'' says the report. Wendell Berry has been suggesting
something like that for two decades. His has been an eloquent
voice against the agribusiness excesses.

    But none of this solves the problem of contentment that is
necessary for an enduring rural culture. What in today's world
is "enough"? Can families set aside the blandishments of
television and be satisfied again with the spectacle of nature
and living close to it, with homemade entertainments and being
with one another doing good work on good land? Ed Sidey thinks
they can, if there is just enough money to keep people apace of
the world in education and health care, if the economic base is
adequate to support quality churches, parks and streets. The
fundamental values still celebrated along Greenfield's streets
are as sound as ever, their loss in cities the cause of human
devastation, something acknowledged now by most experts.

    The Adair County Free Press will continue to tell that
story as it begins its second century; a couple more Sideys are
coming along. The story will be in the birth notices and the
deliberations of the school board, in the obituaries too.
Diligent readers, like those in Greenfield, can keep tabs on who
starts out on the prairies and who ends up there.