I grew up in a small town. Well, it was on a farm near the small town. The town was so small that more people lived in the nearby countryside than in the town. The city limit sign in 1950 said the population was “302“. It just got smaller after that. The first sign you saw when you pulled off the highway said, “Tractors With Lugs Prohibited”. Now, I didn't know what lugs were at the time and it would be long after I grew up and moved away that it would make sense.
We had two grocery stores, a feed store, a jewelry store, a gas station, a train station, a lumber yard, a hardware store, three churches, a doctor’s office, a drug store, a grain elevator, and a post office which was in the old bank building. I vaguely remember a pool hall. Of course, we had a telephone office which was in somebody’s house. One of the grocery stores had an old pot-bellied stove and they burned coal in it. I remember turning around and round to keep one side from getting too hot while the other side got too cold. I remember something about old men spitting tobacco juice.
We had three churches: Baptist, Methodist, and Christian. There were a few Catholic kids in school, but they went to church in the next town. I had heard of other religious denominations, but I couldn’t spell them and was sure that they only existed in other countries.
We had a city park. We did not have a movie house, but I remember once when some travelling entrepreneur with a movie projector came to town. He set up a frame for tarpaulin walls (no roof, mind you) in one corner of the city park, and charged admission to get in to watch the movie. I remember that Mom popped up a huge bag of popcorn to take. I have no idea what the movie was, but I was really excited because there was a cartoon.
Wednesday and Saturday nights were town nights. Everybody came to town. Soda pop was a nickel, a candy bar was a nickel, and a comic book was a nickel. My allowance was a dime. That was OK because the other kids and I took turns buying the comic book. We just had to decide which one we all wanted. However, it was very stressful when it came my turn to buy the comic book because I only had a nickel left and had to choose between a candy bar or a soda pop. Three Musketeers candy bars came with two little creases on the top layer of chocolate so that the bar could be cut into three pieces. The drug store had a soda fountain. You could buy a real vanilla Coke, a root beer float, or a chocolate Sundae, all made right before your very eyes. You could get penny candy, licorice sticks, aspirin, and veterinary supplies all in one place. Talk about a convenience store. You may have noticed that I said “soda pop”. Nobody in my hometown said “soda pop”. They all said “pop”. I don’t know where I picked that up, but it just doesn’t feel right to say “pop” anymore.
The adults congregated in the mercantile to visit. The old men were in one end of the store near the cigarette/cigar/chewing tobacco counter and the old women were in the other end near the sewing goods and bolts of cloth. The old men talked about the crops and the weather, while the old women talked about the old men. When they got tired of talking about the old men, they talked about whoever wasn’t there. Us little kids ran up and down the streets and played while the older kids disappeared. Before I got old enough to figure out what those older kids were doing, television came along and ruined it all. I traded town night for “Gun Smoke” and “Have Gun Will Travel.”
We had a firehouse which came in really handy the day I set the roof of the mercantile on fire. As a teenager, I worked at the mercantile and was burning trash out back. They put the fire out in no time. If you wonder why you never read about the fire in the town paper it is because we didn’t have a town paper.
Our school was so small that we didn’t know what kindergarten was. All twelve grades went to class in the same building. On my first day of school, I thought I was in high school. Back in the early 50’s, everybody said that our class would never graduate from our high school. I thought they meant we weren’t smart enough to pass to the next grade, but I later learned they expected the school to close down before we could graduate. In 1965, when eight of us graduated, we had the smallest high school in the whole state. We had learned the three R’s. For those of you who are currently in high school, that stands for readin’, ‘ritin’, and ‘rithmetic. You know, ‘rithmetic. That’s what you can’t use when your cell phone battery dies and you can’t access the calculator app.
We didn’t have enough kids to have a Senior Class Play so we had a Junior/Senior Class Play. When I was a sophomore, there weren’t enough juniors and seniors so I got to be in the play. When I was a senior, I had the lead part. Mr. Deck, the English teacher, told me it wasn’t because I was such a good actor. He just didn’t have any good choices.
We didn’t play football. We barely had enough kids to play basketball. We played softball but the bench was empty when we weren’t up to bat. Freshmen could make the varsity.
I knew everybody in school. I knew their middle names, I knew their brothers and sisters, heck, I even knew their dogs’ names. I knew everybody in town. The problem with that is when you do something you’re not supposed to, everybody on the party line found out at the same time your mom did.
Party lines worked like this: every phone on the party line had a distinctive ring. My sister worked in the telephone office. I can remember watching her insert the plug into one of the lines when someone rang their phone, let's say they were on the 68 line. She would answer, "Central". They would give her the name of the person they were calling or the number, say 72F12, and she would plug into the 72 line and ring the proper sequence of one long and two shorts. Our phone number was 72F12, so we picked up on one long and two shorts. If, for instance, the phone rang two longs and one short, it was for the neighbor across the highway and down the hill. If your mom wanted to listen to their conversation, she could quietly lift up the receiver and hope that the kids didn't come running into the house screaming for a glass of Kool-Aid or something while she had the phone off the hook.
Our town was so small that we didn’t have a town drunk (after the last two died), so when I got older some of us teenage boys decided we would take turns. It was a matter of who could get their hands on some beer.
There was a town marshal or constable or something like that. He made Barney Fife look like Marshal Matt Dillon. He drove a pickup truck. Somebody said he kept a pistol in the glove box. My guess is that it was rusted so bad it wouldn’t shoot. To my knowledge he never arrested anyone or wrote a ticket. There was one incident when some of us teenage boys were in a ’58 Ford, burning rubber on the blacktop. We saw that pickup truck. The race was on. We tore down the nearby gravel street until we hit the east side of town; it didn’t take long. Then we turned south on another gravel road that would take us out of town. The pickup truck was an ever-diminishing speck in the rear-view mirror. We had neglected to consider that there was a sizeable hump in the road where it crossed the railroad tracks. All four of our wheels caught air when we hit the tracks. Gravel flew. My head hit the ceiling because we didn’t have seat belts. You might wonder what the penalties would have been if we had been caught. A ticket? Arrest? Nah, probably a scolding and if we had given him any lip, he would have called our parents. Why all the bother to outrun a six-cylinder pickup truck? I have only one word for the answer: adventure.
On Labor Day we had our traditional small-town festival with a parade, food, games, entertainment, and maybe a dance. We called it the Homecoming. I guess the school wasn’t big enough to have a homecoming, so we had to get the whole community in it. Sometimes there was a marching band in the parade. Of course, it was from some other, bigger town. If you couldn’t think of anything else to do for the parade, you would get some rolls of brightly colored crepe paper and weave it through the spokes of your bicycle wheels. You would ride your bike somewhere between the fire trucks and the antique tractors. I never quite knew why they called the tractors “antique” because the farmers were still plowing with them. Many years later, I went to the parade and recognized one of the tractors that had belonged to a neighbor when I was a kid. The old farmer had been dead for many years. His heirs had sprayed a new coat of Allis-Chalmers orange on it. It was beautiful, and this time it was an antique.
At Halloween, we would go costume-up and trick or treat. No one worried whether the candy was in its original wrapper or whether it was homemade or not. There weren’t any razor blades in it. I always got a treat. I was glad because I always wondered what kind of trick I was supposed to perform if I didn’t get a treat. We had heard stories of teenagers tipping over outhouses on Halloween. When I was a teenager, we couldn’t find any outhouses. We knew the school superintendent had a little building in his backyard. Several of us slipped back there and worked up a sweat trying to tip it over. It didn’t budge. Later we asked him how he anchored that old outhouse to the ground. He said, “You idiots! I keep my riding lawn mower in that tool shed.”
Twenty-some years after I graduated, someone asked me what was the one thing that defined my hometown. I answered right away, “our high school”. Our community just wouldn’t give it up, or so it seemed. They finally closed the school and tore it down. I was able to get one of the bricks as a souvenir. I wish I knew for sure which part of the school the old brick came from. Before they built the "addition" onto the old building in 1954, there were two old brick outhouses just west of the school. They were abandoned as the new "addition" had indoor plumbing. I know they didn't tear them down in 1954 because they were still there 11 years later. Now I can't be certain if I have a souvenir of the school building or the outhouse.
Back then, towns seemed to be 5 to 10 miles apart, no more, no less. My hypothesis is that “horse and buggy days” in a farming community really meant “horse/mule powered machinery and transportation”. That was if you were lucky and prosperous. Otherwise, you had to walk everywhere. You generally needed to be within five miles of a market to either buy what you needed or sell what you had. If you settled your farm further than that, someone else would see that distance as an economic opportunity and start a general store. Then somebody else would develop some sort of community venture to take advantage of what they considered to be your needs, like a saloon or a church. My little town was five miles from the next little town and nine miles from the nearest “big” town, which served as an economic hub for the county. Our transportation utilized fossil fuels instead of grass and grain, so that distance wasn’t as important to us as it was to the original founders and earlier inhabitants of our community. Our community prospered … until it didn’t. I didn’t know I was riding the downhill slide of my hometown.
It's a new century now. The grocery store closed; the mercantile closed. The gas station, the drug store, the pool hall, the lumber yard, Luther Boone’s Hardware Store, even one of the churches -- all closed. Trains don't stop there anymore. I think they pulled up the tracks and made the right-of-way into a walking trail. There's still a post office but I think they're going to close it, too.
I have let your imagination run long enough. My hometown is in north Missouri. If you adjust a few facts, it could be anywhere.
All of this talk brings me back to the "tractors with lugs" sign. Now I see it as an anachronism. Early tractors were built with steel wheels covered with piercing lugs that dug into the earth to help gain traction. New-fangled hard surface roads couldn’t hold up to tractors with lugs. It was something out of its own time. Rather than see it as a static historical moment, I see it as a part of a continuum that starts with the aboriginal Missourians walking along a trail before the Europeans reintroduced the horse; mules pulling wagons with wooden wheels banded by iron before we put steel belted tires on our cars; maybe it ends at the hover board of "Back to the Future". I wish I had that sign.
Where do little towns like that go? I think they’re on an evolutionary trend somewhere between dust and brick and back to dust. As the stores close in the little towns, the citizens drive to the nearby big towns until they finally move there or they die. Mostly, the kids left for jobs in a big city long ago. Towns just don't need to be 10 miles apart anymore. The people are changing, too. The old women shop at the supermarket instead of visiting at the mercantile, the old men watch the weather forecast on the tv news, and the teenagers hang out in the mall and text each other. Come to think about it, the weather forecast doesn’t matter. Mostly, my generation sold the family farm.
