Old duffers like me, most of whom moved away from The City Beautiful with a fresh high school diploma, like to follow the Facebook page “You might be from Storm Lake, Iowa, if …” where memories are warmed over simpler, in many cases idyllic, times. Historic photos. Not forgotten teachers. And questions like: What was your favorite bar and bartender?
There were at least 99 comments at last count. First place has to go to Marie Boyd of Puff’s White Cap Inn on Lakeshore Drive, who parked at the end of the bar and supervised son Carl tapping ice-cold Falstaffs on a hot Saturday afternoon. I didn’t read all of them, but missed any mention of Louie Henderson of the Pastime Tap in “downtown” Storm Lake.
The Pastime is indeed that along East Railroad Street, a little cobblestone bar with room for maybe a dozen beer quaffers. It was next door to Jannings Clover Farm Market, where you could watch Cletus make sausage, and a block east was Robinson Dairy. Louis Henderson served beer and grand stories about Edna Ferber, who spent her childhood in Ottumwa and went on to write “Showboat” and other great books and plays. He had an adoration like Judge Roy Bean had for Miss Lily. Louie played host to the Hard Rock Kid, King of the Hobos, who died under a tree in Ogden, Iowa, in 1977.
If those days seemed simpler and more stable, they were in many ways. It was the post-war baby boom. The Amalgamated Meat Cutters Union made sure workers at the Hygrade pork plant could afford a motorcycle, a wet bar in the basement and to fully provide for your kid at a state university. At some point, we were convinced to resent that, a perversity hard to fathom. There were twice as many farmers, almost all owning their own hogs. They raised families with a dozen kids on 160 acres. Hunger was something that happened in Africa or Appalachia or some other faraway land. There was little overt racism, because there were no other races than White, really. People tend to get along better when everybody is getting along.
The Pastime is long gone, along with Louie’s Pink Elephant flea market across the Lakeside Blacktop from the Corral Drive In Theatre, where the Cullen boys worked and now faded to black. So are the Clover Farm and the Coast to Coast hardware and Tiny to Teen variety stores, replaced by Walmart and Amazon and other huge automated warehousers.
People in the packing house — overwhelmingly non-White, and primarily Latino — work for half the relative wage of what they did in 1975. Corn is up considerably in the last few months to around $4 per bushel — about the same price it was in 1974. Adjusted for inflation, corn is valued about the same as it was in 1931 (not the best of years). Government payments on top will make it a good year for most. Without socialism, it would not be so good.
“Get big or get out” has echoed the past half century, from Earl Butz to Sonny Perdue. Who owns those hogs? Who cares? China gets the pork, we get the manure. That is our modern value proposition.
When people get paid just enough to make the monthly hump they get a bit anxious. And extreme. It makes people vote for a man like Steve King, who wants to blame this slow wringing of our neck on some poor Mexican. Or Donald Trump. “Hey, pops, were we always a racist hick backwater?”
Well, yes. William Jennings Bryan sort of spoke for the region in 1896 with his cross of gold speech. But the movement also was splintered by racism, and Bryan ended his career at the Scopes Monkey Trial. It killed him, in fact.
We managed to keep our worst tendencies at bay so long as our system was not under stress. That was a matter of balance upset when the money men decided they needed more of it. Reagan busted the unions. Wall Street money drove out the last few independent pork producers in 1998. A new system was constructed on cheap corn, cheap hogs and cheap labor. Our community was transformed right along, like few other places.
Today, Storm Lake is a vastly more interesting and vital place than it was during those simpler times. It also is a more conflicted, consolidated and relatively poorer place where a character like Louie Henderson could not make it on a beer bar serving old men like me. The Hard Rock is a nationally branded casino near Sioux City. If your kid can’t afford the college debt, that would be your fault. Don’t tax me for it because I can’t afford it.
That has become what rural Iowa thinks. We have been trained. Not Storm Lake, necessarily. It is a bubble of tolerance, where immigrant stories are celebrated and different ways are at least tolerated. Edna Ferber was bullied in Ottumwa for being Jewish. That certainly was not an issue in the days of the Clover Farm and Pastime. Our fathers fought a war over that, a victory we re-enacted as boys with popguns in Sunset Park.
A walk past the bandshell Sunday conjured unmistakable memories of a half century ago, which is a sign of dotage. There is a clear connection to a tolerant past, despite getting the lean half handed down to us since. The Methodist Church bells remind me how the churches serve the needy, how Cindy Bosley feeds the poor every year on Thanksgiving. There are more of them nowadays, and they have full-time jobs. That is not how it was in fairer times.
Art Cullen is the editor of The Storm Lake Times in Northwest Iowa. He won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Writing in 2017 and is the author of the book “Storm Lake: A Chronicle of Change, Resilience, and Hope from a Heartland Newspaper.” Cullen can be reached at times@stormlake.com.
From The Progressive Populist, January 1-15, 2021
Blog | Current Issue | Back Issues | Essays | Links
About the Progressive Populist | How to Subscribe | How to Contact Us
PO Box 819, Manchaca TX 78652