THE AXEMATKER'S GIFT -- THE DOUBLE-EDGED BLADE OF COMMUNITY HISTORY!

THE AXEMAKER’S GIFT – THE DOUBLE-EDGED BLADE OF COMMUNITY HISTORY

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 13, 2009

We Americans may wax nostalgic but we have no commitment to the past. We treat the present as the future and ride change as a meteor to oblivion.

We cut away the way it was to a new reality, a reality that we believe finds us gaining something desired but at the expense of something lost forever, and for which we can only pine away in our dreams for it shall never return.

When there is no permanence, no central core to existence, there is no attachment, nothing is sacred, everything is expendable like worn out shoes and old clothes. We have no roots. We become a homeless mind.

* * *

I grew up in a sleepy Iowa town on the Mississippi River called Clinton, Iowa. It was a time when most of us were too poor, and our parents too worn out from suffering through the Great Depression to consider the “cut and control” consequences of change, that is, from “what is” from “what was.” Although tired and weary, they had values, beliefs, and solid faith in a just God.

All changed when they were waken from their lethargy with World War Two.

Clinton, that sleepy town on the river, was also an industrial town with many factories producing sugar from corn, buttons for clothes, seeds for flowers and other plants, garments, candy, alcohol, feed for cattle, packaged chickens, wire shelves for homes, steel tubes for sundry uses, window, sashes and doors for homes, cellophane for industry and homemakers, beams for bridges, and fresh bread baked daily by a national firm.

Overnight, Clinton became a military/industrial complex, and an important contributor to the war effort as well as sending many of its sons and daughters to military service to fight and serve across the globe.

* * *

Clinton, at the time, had more than twenty Protestant churches, five Catholic churches, and a bustling business district on Fifth Avenue South at the South End, and on Main Street at the North End. It had five parochial grammar schools and twelve public grammar schools, two public high schools, and one Catholic high school. It also had boarding schools for girls at Mount St. Clare Academy, High School and Junior College and our Lady of Angels Academy and High School. It had the magnificent Riverview Stadium and River Front Park, Root Park, Chancy Park, and many smaller parks including two picturesque parks downtown. It had the “Big Tree” that separated the North End, or Lyons from the South End, or Clinton. It had the natural umbrella of gigantic elm trees that stretched from Fifth Avenue South and Fourth Street to Bluff Boulevard. The bluff was a winding road cut from the limestone hills that abutted it with eloquent homes on its crest.

At Christmas Time, the Iten mansion would be decked out in thousands of Christmas lights with every Christmas theme imaginable rising from the bluff to the heights of the home.

The Clinton Herald was the main organ of communication of this sleepy town of 33,000, and it did its best to bring Christmas and Season’s cheer to the community with colorful and thoughtful themes throughout the holidays. KROS (Keep Right On Smiling) was the community radio station, broadcasting news, but most particularly, the athletic contests of Clinton high school teams.

And then there was the Clinton Country Club on Fourteenth Street sprawling for acres with a carefully maintained 18-hole golf course, clubhouse and meeting place for the movers and shakers of the community.

* * *

More than 100 years ago, an Irish priest came to this sleepy town on the river and created St. Patrick’s Church, Rectory and School. I attended grammar school there, and it became the roots from which everything else has sprung. The good priest also created a hospital, Mercy, a home for nuns and young girls, Mount St. Clare, a home for the aged, Mount Alverno, and was an influence in having the Davenport Diocese purchase property of an anti-Catholic organization that became Sacred Heart Church, Rectory, and Grammar School.

One hundred years ago, a series of movers and shakers started to settle in Clinton. They would starts businesses, create jobs, and build school, churches, and a solid infrastructure. They were builders of permanence, one commissioning a world famous architect to build a department store. They also built an opera house and theatre for the legitimate stage. A world famous actress and clown grew out of Clinton’s soil.

And at mid-century, because many of these booming manufacturing operations hired poor Clinton kids to work in their factories during the summer, Clinton has contributed skilled minds across the United States to become movers and shakers in their own right.

* * *

But alas, the past is dead, the present tainted, and the future left up for grabs. There are no longer five Catholic parishes but one. There are no longer twenty Protestant congregations but half that number and many of them are struggling mightily today to stay operational. Mount St. Clare and the Lady’s of Angels are penny postcards of history no longer visible in the firmament. .

The company that converted corn into sugar, and was responsible for my getting a college education by employing me for five summers, is no longer a Clinton operation, but part of an international mega-corporation.

This mega-corporation has swallowed up the neighborhood of my birth, South Clinton. It no longer exists replaced by silos and hoppers, railroad tracks and loading docks.

The beautiful buildings of downtown Clinton, especially the one designed by the great architect, is now a HUD casualty. Other prominent downtown buildings have even faired less well as Fifth Avenue limps forward no longer the showcase it once was, when it bustled with droves of shoppers on a weekend. Discount stores on Camanche Avenue South on the periphery of Clinton provide staples while most Clintians visit the Quad Cities 38 miles away of a weekend for major purchases, or they gamble away their limited funds at the new Mecca, the lavish casino in the same Camanche Avenue neighborhood.

There is only one jewel left, a reminder of yesterday, a place called “Guzzardos,” a gift and bookshop. This warm and personal little shop keeps the tradition alive of picture book Clinton, stubbornly resisting change. It has also become a home for Clinton authors who return with books they have written.

The Clinton Herald, like newspapers across the country, struggles to stay in print, and is no long a Clinton paper, but a Clinton County organ, and KROS has been reduced to an AM-radio station.

Second Street, the seven-mile street connecting the North to the South is penciled with fast-food restaurants as is the case with many other small towns across America. Clinton High, which was once architecturally a beautiful campus, a landmark soft on the eyes, now looks more like a fortress than an open campus of learning.

Riverview Stadium and River Front Park, however, have been modernized, and a dike built from one end of the town to the other to prevent the raging spring waters of the Mississippi from drowning adjacent property. There are always pluses with the negatives, and this is a definite positive.

I’m not so sure the demise of the Clinton Country Club is a positive even if it is to allow expansion of the on-line university, Ashford University, an educational institution that has already erased Franciscan University, which had replaced Mount St. Clare Academy, High School, and College from the community. It may prove to be, but it worries me, at what expense?

* * *

All I do know is the “cut and control” phenomenon has become a cultural reality to this day. We take pride in progress as our most important product refusing or unable to see what we get for the progress compared to what we give up. What we give up never returns. That is a given.

Once you make the cut, you cannot mend the damage. You cut a highway through rich farmland; you cannot restore that land to productive crops. It is lost forever.

I wrote a book in 2004, NEAR JOURNEY’S END? CAN PLANET EARTH SURVIVE SELF-INDULGENT MAN? It was never published. We don’t like to think about the unthinkable. We just move through the queue like cattle to the slaughter until it is too late, and so it has been for the past 12,000 years since we moved from hunters and gatherers, taking only what we needed to survive, to agriculture and forming communities and hierarchies, developing better tools, exploiting the land, mushrooming in population . . . from past imperfect, to present ridiculous to future perfect where we believe we have answers to everything with the new god of science.

* * *