THE DEATH OF A NEIGHBORHOOD

Death of a Neighborhood

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
(c) July 2005

"You look like you're lost, sir," said a stout female security officer,
as she left her vehicle with the large letters ADM on the vehicle's door.

"No, I'm not lost. I'm observing how you have destroyed the neighborhood
of my birth."

In an officious manner, obviously feeling duty bound to fulfill her
appointed role, she replied, "I'm sorry to tell you, sir, but you are now on
private property."

"That is sad," I said as I put my car in reverse, hesitating to touch the
button to automatically roll up my window. Turning her back to me as she
returned to her vehicle, I could hear her say, almost to herself, Yes, it is,
isn't.

My old neighborhood is South Clinton in Clinton, Iowa. It once was a
vibrant, down-to-earth working class neighborhood of people of German, Irish,
Native American, Norwegian, Swedish, and Italian heritage, hard working folks,
many of whom were not far removed from the old country of their parents' or
grandparents' birthplace. Yet, South Clinton often suffered the social
distinction of being seen as a people, or as those "below the tracks" people by the more
gentrified citizens of the community.

Indeed, South Clinton is bounded by the railroad tracks on two sides, the
mighty Mississippi River on a third, and this imposing plant on its most
southern side.

Bread winners in South Clinton worked at Curtis Wood, the Chicago & North
Western shops, Swift Poultry, DuPont, Collis, the garment factory, among many
other manufacturing facilities once thriving in the area, and of course, ADM,
which has had more different names and employers associated with it than a
house of orphans.

In my time, it was known as the Sugar Refinery, Clinton Foods, Clinton
Corn, Standard Brands, and now Archer Daniel Midland, or ADM.

To this operation's credit, it survived the worse days of the Great
Depression of 1929, and has operated uninterruptedly over the course of nearly a
century. With each iteration of owners, it has ridden the back of science to
develop ever more imaginative products from the processing of Iowa corn into
syrup, sugar, lactic acid, hops, starch, gluten, feed for stock, ethanol as a
supplement to petroleum, to name only a handful of its contributions.

At the same time, where a century ago this community turned logs floated
down the Mississippi River from Minnesota and Wisconsin into gold dust, it now
turns Iowa's rich loam soil of planted corn into pure industrial gold to an
alchemist's delight. I say this because ADM is the only surviving and
prospering company of those many mentioned above in this new century, and thus the
dilemma.

South Clinton people worked hard to become homeowners, to be people of
property, and to experience a glimmer of the American Dream. They paid their
taxes, kept their clapboard houses up as well as could be expected with the
constant rain of soot, ash, wood dust, burnt corn debris, and spent gases from
these industrial outlets. Sometimes it seemed as if the sun could not break
through the industrial fog or that the aroma of cut grass could be scented through
the heavy odors of burnt corn, wood shearing, or blast furnaces of burning
coal and oil.

People didn't complain. They were too busy working and living to notice.
It was outsiders who would always remind them of the fact. They sent their
children to school at Irving, or to Chancy on the hill, or if Catholic, to St.
Mary's also on the hill. The one desire they had was for their children to
do better than they had done. So, they perpetuated the American Dream.

The mighty Mississippi River flowed by the neighborhood, and its banks
belonged to them. It provided a vista of nature with its assorted islands and
sloughs. Beaver Island, the largest in the area, provided homes for many
residents. The Mississippi was rich in carp, bass, and catfish, and provided
excellent blinds for duck hunting in the fall, as well as ice skating and ice
fishing in the winter. Nearly every family had some kind of boat from canoe on up.
The river was a virtual paradise and they owned it, that is, until now! It
has been sheared away from them as surely as hope can be sheared away from
courage.

My family left South Clinton when I was two, but the heart of the family,
especially that of my mother, remained there forever. She kept in touch with
family and friends who remained there for several generations, many in the
same homes, feeling a sense of identity and security with the unalienable rights
to know as property owners their rights of ownership were inviolable.

What they failed to recognize is that progress is America's most
important product, and nothing must stand in the way of progress. Nothing! Progress
is an insatiable animal with an appetite always for more. Progress devours
dreams and neutralizes passions with the implacable swiftness of a robotic
knife.

Friends had told me to take a look at my old neighborhood for myself
during this brief trip back to Clinton for a book signing and a visit with
friends, and my sister, Pat Waddell, and her extended family. I was sure they had
exaggerated the impact of ADM's expansion into the neighborhood. Instead, I was
shocked beyond my senses. They had killed it and carried off its corpse,
leaving only debris as memory of its passing.

I drove slowly down a makeshift dirt road as I witnessed giant earth
movers crushing the final bones of concrete streets and sidewalks into manageable
chunks awaiting the hungry mouths of machines to lift them into huge trucks to
haul them off to unconsecrated dumps. Fortunately, all the houses had
already been erased from the neighborhood and I didn't have to see them crushed and
to hear their screams of anguish and pain and their walls collapsed. Not a
blade of grass could be seen anywhere as bulldozers rushed about to turn the
earth into level plains.

Where the McDermotts and Hydes, Eklands and Kings had lived were gone as
were the homes of many other families I once remembered living there.
Instead, the acronym ADM is on the security van, fences, trucks, smoke stakes,
everywhere. It reinforces with defiance, "Face it! This is ours, no longer yours!"
And it is, bought with honest money and agreed upon terms. It is reality.

Talking to a friend, who is still a holdout, and a third generation
resident of the same house, I sense the defeat in her words. "They paid people a
good price for their places," she confessed, then adding, "They haven't come as
far as my property, but I'd sell in a minute to them if they did. My fear is
that the city will impose Eminent Domain and give me nothing for this place."


She then shared with me what had happened to homeowners in other places
across America in the recent past. I listened knowing how true, and yet how
helpless her words were. I had read the same stories with concern, remembering
when I came to Tampa from South Africa in the late 1960s. Much of the Cuban
community of Ybor City outside Tampa's city proper was erased by government
fealty. It was called "urban redevelopment," but the land laid vacant for years,
only today to become a sprawling but poor imitation of the French Quarters of
New Orleans.

"Do you think there is any hope?" she asked me.

"No, I don't think so," I answered, sharing with her the fact that the
Supreme Court most recently had ruled in favor of corporations being allowed to
negotiate with local governments to erase neighborhoods to improve the tax
base of such communities. The homeowners had little recourse but to accept their
lot.

Two sets of ironies come to mind in the "Death of a Neighborhood." One
is that a disproportionate number of my friends who grew up in South Clinton
have either died early in life, or have suffered or are suffering from incurable
diseases. It causes me to wonder if the climate of the community was a
factor. If so, they would be better off living and growing up elsewhere. My
friend in this instance is suffering from cancer, and has fought valiantly to deal
with it without complaint or projection of the blame on the location of her
home.

The final irony is that were it not for the Clinton Corn Processing
Company, then the name of the company, I would not have had a chance for a college
education. I worked for five summers at Clinton Corn while acquiring two
degrees. It so happens that Clinton Corn, now Standard Brands, Inc., was my first
employer as a chemist in research and development in the technical service
department under Dr. Newton. I would not have been able to enjoy the
professional life I have experienced were it not for this place of summer employment.

In my day, more than one hundred college students were hired each summer
by Clinton Corn, and paid at the same scale as other entry level employees.
As a result, we have in this country many doctors, lawyers, scientists,
engineers, teachers, politicians, ministers and priests, authors and scholars,
administrators, managers and executives, as well as business creators and
entrepreneurs, who owe the opportunity of a college education to this
company-of-many-names.

Now, ADM is a major employer of the community. Were it to leave, its
void would be hard to fell. That said, something is wrong with this picture.
When a community becomes hostage to an employer or a set of employers, it has
lost its identity as an independent entity if not its well to survive.

Clinton, Iowa has had many iterations in its 150 years of adaptation,
assimilation, growth and development, and survival with an industrial-driven
community being only one.

I am writing this as I've just returned from visiting many places, among
them Hannibal, Missouri, where the legend and wonder of Samuel Clemens as Mark
Twain is preserved as a tourist attraction. Clinton has a rich history of
great personages such as Lillian Russell, Marquis Childs, Duke Slater, Hank
Dihlmann, Bob Dalrymple, Bobby Witt, Gussie Witt, Jack Dunmore, Dick Tharp, Dick
Crider, Ray Gilbert, Lefty Ward, Warren Mason, Ward Markley, Kenny Ploen, Chuck
Vogt, Jack Schuster, Jim Lesher, Leroy Watts, Dean Burridge, Dick Price, T.
Petersen, Dean Piper, Howard Boegel, and the "Fire Wagon Five," Max Lynn, Felix
Adler, Dick Farwell, St. Mary's 1954 State Basketball Champions, and on and
on. It has had the Itens, Youngs, Lambs, Joyces, Van Allens, and many others
who were the shapers of the Clinton community of the past.

The Clinton Historical Society has preserved this history, and Kathy
Flippo has written rich and poignant books about the area and the river. My
references here are off the top of my head. I'm remembered primarily as a jock and
my references reflect that.

Meaning to cast no aspersions on today, I think it was electric and
imaginative the way The Clinton Herald created the "Fire Wagon Five" of the 1945
Clinton High basketball team, or the way it presented "Golden Glove Boxing" of
that period. It was vibrant, imaginative, energetic, and captured with words
and pictures a sense of place. That is missing today, no doubt because of the
competition and all the distracting alternatives to people's attention.

In a word, I see Clinton as an a potential entertainment and tourist's
Mecca, not the place I saw where it celebrated its 150th birthday without
banters on every pole, and without bold banters across every intersection. I am
told the community is tired, that net income of families are down, that most go
to Davenport to do their shopping, that the Catholic population continues to
dwindle as less and less baptized Catholics attend mass on Sunday, and even less
contribute to the collection box. On the other hand, I see the streets in
the best shape I've ever seen them. I see businesses punching through the
blight to boldly establish new optimism on fifth avenue and elsewhere. I see the
waterfront decorated in its best, and the best ballpark in the low minors in
splendid condition. So, while in the film "Field of Dreams" the message was,
"build it and they will come," my sense is the same for Clinton, "believe it and
it will happen."

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
Website: www.peripateticphilosopher.com
blog: peripateticphilosopher.blogspot.com