AUTHOR FISHER REFLECTS ON HIS RETURN TO HIS ROOTS!

AUTHOR FISHER REFLECTS ON HIS RETURN TO HIS ROOTS

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© June 2007

Author Thomas Wolfe wrote a compelling novel, You Can’t Go Home Again (1940). It was his last novel published posthumously as he died two years before at the age of 38. In the novel, after being out in the world – these were the riotous years in Europe prior to WWII – he returns to his mountain home seeking the peace and quiet of his boyhood, only to find it caught up in the same nervous frenzy of his time.

When I first returned to Clinton after an absence of many years in the 1990s, many of my friends who had stayed were as congenial as ever. I spent twelve weeks during that decade researching IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE, a snapshot of growing up in Clinton in the war years of the 1940s.

I returned in 2003 for a speaking and book signing tour of this book in Clinton and the Quad Cities. I have not been back since.

Thomas Wolfe has a point that the home you leave is never the home you return to, partly because you have a perspective of a world apart, in my case working and living for many years abroad, and therefore lacking the continuity of the elapsing daily life in the community since I had left.

Take the magnificent courthouse prominently displayed on the front cover of IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE. It is still there, but totally gutted and modernized inside, while St. Patrick’s Catholic Church, Rectory and School on the back cover have been erased from the landscape, the sanctuary of my formative years.

Already in the 1990s, the playground that introduced me to baseball, football, basketball, and ice-skating in the winter -- the lawn bridging the county jail with the courthouse – was gone. It had been replaced by a public safety building for the county sheriff department.

By 2003, the scores of taverns that snaked their way along Clinton’s seven mile promenade had been largely replaced by fast-food restaurants from the city limits south and Camanche Avenue to Second Street north and Lyons.

Clinton was once famous for its collection of taverns. Also missing were the Chicago & North Western Railroad Shops along Camanche Avenue, once the primary employer of many members of my Irish-Norwegian clan.

If they didn’t work for the railroad, they worked for Clinton Foods, which has undergone many iterations of owners. My da once worked for both. Incidentally, if not for Clinton Foods, which employed me for five summers while attending the University of Iowa, I suspect my life would have turned out quite differently.

Like Thomas Wolfe, however, there are bittersweet memories as my roots rise out of South Clinton, which has been swallowed up by the current iteration of Clinton Foods (ADM) with the punctuation mark of a golden dome to mark its territory.

People of my generation identified with the neighborhood of their birth: south of the tracks (South Clinton), off Camanche Avenue (Chancy Park), above the big tree (Lyons), and so on. New neighborhoods have sprung up, but the old ones are still holding firm, except South Clinton, which is no more.

I mention this because my sense of place has never left my mind. This is where my values were first formed. Those values have given me an amazing freedom, and indeed security, to listen to my own drummer and to know I have real roots with real people.

Splitting grammar school between Lyons (St. Boniface) and the courthouse area (St. Patrick’s), then high school (Clinton High), I experienced cultural shock going from private to public school that apparently is now a thing of the past, for there is no St. Boniface or St. Patrick’s.

The catholic school system of the 1940s with the nuns of the Sisters of St. Francis and the priests of the Davenport Diocese represented a total cultural immersion in the ancient tradition of Catholic programming. I have never outgrown this as a thinker or writer.

The movement of the casino from offshore to Clinton’s beautiful riverfront offends me. I see gambling as part of the new plague and write about it in A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD. In this convoluted climate, people are looking for something for nothing; for luck as substitute for misplaced pluck. It is actually evidence of being stuck, which is the subject of my book and on how to become unstuck. A casino is not the answer. It is part of our societal sickness.

Today, the nuns are gone in Clinton as elsewhere, priests are few and far between, and the public school system, which in Clinton has always been excellent, is greatly challenged in these flippant times.

The strength of Clinton is its people. They nurtured and launched me into the world. People of Clinton to whom I owe a special debt include Gussie Witt, Jack Dunmore, Lyle Sawyer, sheriff Ky Petersen, deputies Chris Stamp and Jim Gaffey, Bobby Witt, Del Ploen, Billy McKinley, coach Ed Rashke, coach Dean Burridge, of course, my parents, as well as Sister Mary Flavian, Sister Mary Helen, Sister Mary Gertrude, Sister Mary Cecilia, and Father Anthony Geertz.

It is no accident that the first and last sentence of IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE is of Bobby Witt. It was because Bobby was my ideal: open, fun, funny, intelligent, athletic, caring, modest, and there, always there. He also had a way to puncture my cockiness. Once I told him I had a photographic memory. He didn’t say anything until we attended a movie at the Rialto. After the film credits rolled, he said, “Did you see the credits?” I nodded. “Okay, hot shot, repeat them.” It is how I remember Clinton as I prepare to visit it once again.

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An edited version of this is to appear in The Clinton Herald in August 2007 prior to Dr. Fisher's book speaking and signing tour in the midwest.