WHO IS IN CHARGE?

WHO IS IN CHARGE?

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© September 2006


God, the power of words! I received an email of an article in which a journalist was commenting on his impressions of baseball teams he visited in the Midwest. One such team was the Lumber Kings of Clinton, Iowa playing at Riverview stadium. Clinton happens to be my hometown. His comment captured the reality of Clinton with warmth if not euphemistic tact, as “a center struggling to hang on in a soft economy."

It happened I was having lunch with my daughter, a professional model, the same day I read this about Clinton. It was the place where she was born. Unfortunately, we left almost immediately to live in near and far flung places such as Chicago, Indianapolis, Louisville, Europe and South Africa, and now in Tampa.

Briefly, she visited Clinton this past summer with her own daughter, and loved the place, its ambiance, its relaxed non-congested easy goingness, its friendliness, and its brightness.

I've not been back for a while, but keep tabs on its status, so I asked her, "Would you like to live there," this woman that has always lived in metropolitan areas.

"Live there?" she came back, "What would I do?" Then correcting me, she said, "I meant I liked visiting it for a few days. It is a wonderful respite from all the commotion and noise, that's all I meant, relaxing."

What started my mind reflecting on this baseball story, and its reference to my hometown, was the fact that I played in the Industrial League as a catcher for Pillsbury Mills as an eighth grader going into ninth grade. I also played many games in this same beautiful baseball stadium for the Junior American Legion, and a team called the “Lyons Merchants.”

Dreamily, I remembered the place of my youth, an eclectic industrial blue-collar town of many small job shops and specialized industries, and I loved the place. I told her it was in those days a town of about 33,000 with a sparkling downtown business district, and once luxurious homes of Clinton’s halcyon days converted into the YWCA, Sarah Harding Home, and other utilitarian places; that it had a monumental panoply of giant oak trees forming a cathedral ceiling extending from Fifth Avenue and Fourth Street all the way out to Bluff Boulevard; and that it was a town with a center that controlled its own destiny with self-assurance and self-reliance, beholden to no one.

"It can't be nearly that big now," she said, "and there is virtually no real downtown. You can walk practically anywhere and run into little traffic, which I loved." Then she got thoughtful, "what happened to make it so small?"

Then I thought of a line from one of my books about America: “We are not happy campers. We have lost our moral compass and thus our way.” My reference was to the great retreat from our indigenous values. She has heard all that before. It is the quickest way for her eyes to glaze over, and to break contact with me.

So, instead, I treated her to a bit of history that I share with readers in my memoir-as-a-novel, IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE.

"Clinton," I said, "has a history of propinquity and serendipity," moving on to explain my meaning.

"Because of the many island obstacles and the narrowness of the straits of the Mississippi as it passes by Clinton, it was not advantageous or economical to float logs down from the North (Minnesota and Wisconsin) past Clinton, and so it became the sawdust capital of the entire world."

“Sawdust capital?” She looked at me suspiciously, "You’re kidding?"

I shook my head. "In fact," I continued, "it was that sawdust gold during the first quarter of the last century that resulted in Clinton having more per capita millionaires than any other place in the world."

Again, she found this hard to believe. "Sawdust gold?"

"Sawdust was gold," I repeated, "and Clinton, because of it, became a cultural, intellectual, social, and entertainment center with the world's movers and shakers frequently finding their way to Clinton, as America was emerging as a great nation."

Then with dramatic pause, I added, "Clinton was in the mainstream in its own right."

She smiled, "You're putting me on, right?"

I shook my head again. "Read Clinton, Iowa history, and you’ll see I'm not kidding. I only touch on the subject in my book, but it is a vibrant history, I assure you."

Again, she pressed. "But if that is true, what about now? Why is it, well, so ..."

I added for her, "so drab?"

"No, I was thinking 'so slow'."

"You mean so out of the mainstream as it once was?"

She shrugged, "I guess."

I explained, "There was a massive exodus of the high rollers, as if Clinton was experiencing its own Chicago fire, when the logs quit coming, the sawmills shut down, the 200 person garden parties disappeared, and the operas and symphonies had no audience.

"The fire in the mind was in the form of panic. So, when the money people left, so did jobs, and with no jobs, people were forced to move on."

To my surprise, she was listening, as she corrected me. "But you grew up in the 1940s, not the 1920s! You said it was very much alive, then, with all kinds of activities."

I complimented her for listening, and then continued, "The war saved Clinton's bacon, but it was able to save its bacon because it was ready. It is that old adage that defines luck as 'when preparation meets opportunity.'

“Clinton was prepared. Big companies didn't swoop into the vacuum when the sawmills shut down. Not at all. Small venture capitalists set up job shops and small industries gradually filling Clinton's moral center with hope to replace the panic, and then the war came, which gave Clinton a rebirth, as the Sphinx rose out of the sawdust.

"This lasted into the 1960s, and then petered out when the rest of the world caught up with the U.S. It didn't just happen to Clinton, but across the American continent. Many other places like Clinton went under, as their identity and moral center disappeared with the ‘slowdown of the economy.’

"You can always tell when this is the case, not just with closed down plants, vacant lots, neglected buildings, and mobile home parks replacing standard homes. The more telling sense of it is the obsession with nostalgia.

“People become melancholy, something I never experienced in my growing up years. My parents didn’t talk about the ‘why it was,’ but the way it would be. They sent their eldest son off to college, and this from a family of few high school and no college graduates.

“They embraced the unknown, not the known. The future was uncertain, but they were optimistic, which made certainty irrelevant. I look back in amazement at the palpable evidence of this. Coming from a family that could not always make its $60 a month house payment, it paid for their eldest son to wear braces on his teeth for four years, something only the wealthy middle class took for granted. But this mother was convinced her son was going to be ‘somebody.’

“Schools, I might add, weren’t considered prisons in those days, but launching pads to the future. Pride was part of this moral center. It was visible in the glint of the teacher’s eye, and the posture of the student. I would say close to ninety percent of my peers have benefited from this connection. Now, you are paying a king’s ransom for your children’s education in private schools, and grammar school no less, which cost my parents nothing, and I can’t see from what I have observed that it is superior.” I looked for an interruption but there was none. So, I continued.

“You can tell a place is sick if not dying when student drop out rates form an ascending linear curve. Even more telling is when the bell curve of population distribution is skewed toward the old and away from the young, as is the case in Clinton and across the Midwest. Vibrant youth is the key to hope and that key cannot fit into many locks when young adults are not having children.”

“Dad,” my daughter interrupted, “you’re getting so serious. Please! I just said I liked Clinton. What’s all this about nostalgia and this other stuff? I didn’t ask you about it.”

“No, you didn’t. You simply asked me what caused Clinton to become small. It made me think about South Clinton, where your grandmother was born. It is a place no more, and it triggered other things. I apologize, but not totally. You see, a big company, ADM, has sucked South Clinton dry with the rationale of creating jobs, and the community has gone along with it, as if it had no choice.

“Once you succumb to what you think is inevitable, it is, and you no longer own yourself. It is the same for a community as an individual.”

“You’re talking about yourself now. I know your history, dad, I know how you won’t let anyone or anything own you, and I’m a little like that.”

“More than a little.”

“You know, honey, when we lived in South Africa, the company there wanted to duplicate my Chicago salary, keeping it quiet, even give us a house, and I said, ‘thanks, but no thanks.’ It was then that I knew I had to resign. I knew things and they wanted to own me to protect their interests. They wanted to buy my silence. It is not new. Happens all the time, but I wouldn’t play ball.

“If they owned me, they could control me. I didn’t want to be controlled, and I knew that if I didn’t go along with the charade they would make my life miserable.”

“Meaning in connection with all this?”

“Communities are pressured the same as individuals are. It is only a matter of scale. There is nothing wrong with communities shrinking on principle. A city newspaper becomes a regional newspaper, franchises replace independent businesses, school districts amalgamate from multiple to singular status, but when someone offers to save you, and it seems too good to be true, it probably is.

“I could see in South Africa retiring by the age of forty by succumbing to their offer, but then I would have to live with myself, and of course, they would own me for the rest of my life. I chose instead to retire, and you kids suffered for my decision, no longer living in a style to which you had become accustomed.

“The funny thing about that is that three of you have found your way to it on your own without my help. Your father didn’t give you a golden parachute, and you knew he wouldn’t put one under you if you failed. You were on your own the same as he had been on his own. You made your own way by reinventing yourself, sometimes over and over again, as in your case.”

“So you’re saying it is the same with communities.”

“Precisely so. A community has the irreplaceable good fortune of its collective identity, vales, pride, purpose, and will to survive. If it barters that away, it no longer owns its destiny. This fortune composes its moral center and becomes the mechanism of its moral compass guiding and directing it through all its opportunities and challenges that are inevitably ahead.

“Once its surrenders, even a part of its guidance system to another, it loses its ‘will within’ to prevail come what may. It becomes the dependent stepchild of someone else’s destiny translated into its current needs.

“In a climate of turmoil, the tendency is to look for answers outside, and to project problems as somebody else’s fault. This is the same with communities as with individuals. The community becomes increasingly dependent upon its temporary benefactor, who incidentally, can pull out at any time.

“Take Ford Motor Company. Countless communities across the country were nearly totally dependent on ‘the company store’ for their total survival. Now, Ford is gone. Only today it offered early retirement to 75,000 employees. It is in a panic mode.

“Don’t think because a company spends millions in plant construction that it plans to stay. Ford spent more than a quarter billion in more than one place and it is pulling out leaving those respective communities in the lurch.

She put her hand up. "You’re losing me. Stay on Clinton. I don't like it when you start generalizing. You confuse me."

I put my own hands up in surrender.

"Okay, guilty as charged. What I see in Clinton, and I've seen it elsewhere is that when a place loses its center, for whatever reason, it does what individuals do when they have lost their drive. They quit growing. They look back to the glory days rather than ahead. They become vulnerable to short-term solutions, putting aside such problems as soil and stream and air pollution, until people start dying, retreating into nostalgia.

“When a community is obsessed with its past, it loses its future. It loses its vitality, and when it loses its vitality, it loses its way.

“Your compliment to Clinton about being relaxing could be construed as a criticism of its dullness, of its failure to grow with the times, of becoming increasingly peripheral to them."

Again, she got that glazed look.

"You were born in Clinton and we moved almost immediately to Indianapolis, then Kentucky, then you were in Europe and Africa, and so on. You grew up on the run seeing places in constant change, and Clinton to you is like frozen music that never changes, but, you see, it has. Many of the people running Clinton now didn’t grow up there. They don’t have it in their DNA. They don’t have it in their bones.

“Clinton has lost its center and sold out for jobs. What do I mean? When Clinton had a center it had the ambiance of vibrant neighborhoods that defined it. In my youth, it may not have been like it was in the 1920s, but in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s the ambiance was still there if straining to remain viable.

“Now, the once vibrant neighborhood of South Clinton is gone. It has been gobbled up for jobs. Chancy is another place. It will probably be next. There was once a vibrant neighborhood downtown, producing a lot of leaders that now stretch across the world, but certainly no longer downtown.

“The same is true of Hilltoppers where St. Mary's once had a vibrant ambiance. The same was true of the Courthouse neighborhood, and Lyons, or the neighborhoods north of the Big Tree.

“These neighborhoods never talked about the way it was. They were too busy being the way it is.

“This confederation of neighborhoods, from all classes and ethnicities, has produced doctors, lawyers, teachers, preachers, coaches, astronauts, engineers, scientists, psychologists, writers, administrators, executives, politicians, musicians, artists, architects, writers, playwrights, journalists, publishers, consultants, professional athletes, professors, inventors, professional soldiers and sailors, priests, rabbis, ministers, philanthropists, industrialists, builders, bricklayers, carpenters, electricians, plumbers, sales people, and on and on.

“These people rose out of the soil of this eclectic ambiance. Where did they go? Nearly always to somewhere else.

“When a community experiences ‘brain drain,’ as Clinton has consistently experienced it in the last half century, the center becomes fragile, fragmented, and empty only to more resemble a vacuum than any other space.

“When that happens, neighborhoods can be sucked up for jobs, and the community feels defenseless because without jobs what is there, right?”

My daughter shakes her head affirmatively.

"Wrong," I said emphatically. “Jobs don't make a community, a community makes jobs.

“When jobs govern the community, it is under siege. It has sacrificed its identity for those jobs. That didn't happen when the millionaires left in droves and the logging business collapsed. Solid people stayed the course, perhaps because they had no choice, but also because some risk takers started from scratch like Collis and Curtis and Iten and DePew to build a Clinton that refused to sacrifice one iota of its identity. Instead, it chose to rise like the Sphinx out of the sawdust ash.

“The barbarians didn't come into the city like the Visigoths and Huns to take it over like they did Rome. They were subtler, but not by much.

“John Helyar, a writer I'm sure you don't know, wrote a book called Barbarians at the Gate, which was about a company's collapse (Nabisco), but it illustrates what happens when a place loses its center.

“James Stewart wrote a book that enlarged on the theme called Den of Thieves, showing precisely what happens when a place allows someone else to fight its battles, a place that looks for the easy way out.

“There is always someone with jobs that is ready to move into a place when it takes on the appearance of a vacuum. And when it does, it sucks up neighborhoods in the same manner as the little fish is eaten by the bigger fish who in turns is eaten by the bigger fish."

"Stop, dad! God, all this for just telling you I found Clinton relaxing, and wondered why it had gotten small. I still miss your point."

"Laurie, what has your father been doing most of his life?"

"Traveling. I don't remember seeing you much in all my growing up years, even in Europe and South Africa, you were always traveling."

"What do you think I was doing?"

"I have no idea."

"I was eating up neighborhoods about the globe, only the neighborhoods I was eating up were loaded with natural resources, or were small companies in which I always played on their vulnerabilities, always creating the impression it was best for them when all the good jobs went mainly to foreigners, while giving the natives short shrift with the sense they had no choice in the matter.”

“That doesn’t sound like you, nor too nice."

I paused. "Do you remember South Africa?"

"Yes, of course."

"I was more than a decade younger than you are right now, when we were there. Do you remember what I did?"

"Yes," she said, "you quit and we moved to Florida and you went back to school."

"No, that is not quite right. I went back to school after doing nothing for two years."

"Oh, yeah, I remember now. You played tennis all the time and read books, and wrote, and played basketball with Bobby and his friends. Mom didn’t like it much because you didn't do anything else."

"Well, that's close, but what was more true is that I got tired of sucking up neighborhoods for jobs. I got tired of corpocracy."

"If you say so," she answered, obviously worn out by my diatribe.


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