A Tapestry of Prairie Life

By Hugh Sidey

A new sign in stately Old English letters has been hung up on the worn red brick building, the leaky roof has been repaired, and the staff has thumbed gingerly through crumbling back issues, gathering fragments of history to print again. The Adair County Free Press of Greenfield, Iowa, is just about ready for its 100th birthday next week. Same newspaper, same family of editors, no sellout to a chain, no fortunes made or lost, circulation steady at 3,200 in a county of 9,500 and a town of 2,200. The back issues form a tapestry of small events, a century of stories of children's birthdays, club meetings, 4-H calves, men and women going off to war and, always, the terrors and joys of the Great Prairie weather. Good people, good earth, both granted dignity and meaning on the pages of a tiny paper.

Editor and publisher Ed Sidey, my brother, will drape a wisp of bunting over the new sign, print a modest centennial edition and later hold a small open house with coffee and cookies and a lot of laughter. Then he and his crew of nine will begin the work of the second century.

"Will the paper be around another 100 years?" he wonders. "Will the town be recognizable in 2089?" He thinks so, but he is troubled. So are all the people who still make up a rural culture of farms and small towns from the Appalachians to the Rockies, for all of our history a taproot that nourished the other branches. The crisis of the farms themselves has passed for now, but around Greenfield's town square the economic strain has worsened. A hardware store, a drugstore, a grocery store, a Ford dealership have all closed within three years. County residents are lured to the shopping centers of Des Moines, 60 miles east over smooth highways they helped build.

A Wal-Mart is going up in Creston, 20 miles away, and Greenfield's merchants fear the worst. Wall Street traders will hail America's richest man, Sam Walton, and his relentless retailing march across the country. But Walton's new store, dropped in a field of asphalt (one of 1,400 in his discount empire) will suck a bit more of the commercial life out of Greenfield and similar towns in the same radius. Another comfortable old building with arched windows and high ceilings may have to be padlocked. Not so long ago they were all open, and the square filled up on Saturday night, when neighbors came to buy and gossip. Prices were less important then than people. A caring society thrived there and helped to sustain the values that politicians now like to talk about as they see order and meaning melt away in urban complexes.

The rural culture was never as kindly and not always as pleasant as legend would have it. But necessity forced a concern for family and community and an interdependence that as often as not subdued meanness and selfishness. A certain virtue and hope were required for survival.

"A human community, if it is to last long, must exert a sort of centripetal force, holding local soil and local memory in place," Kentucky farmer- philosopher Wendell Berry told Iowans last year in a lecture on the work of local culture. "Country people more and more live like city people, and so connive in their own ruin. More and more country people, like city people, allow their economic and social standards to be set by television and salesmen and outside experts."

Berry's view is that if nothing is done to preserve rural culture, we will lose, as a nation, "the continuity of attention and devotion without which the human life of the earth is impossible." An extreme view, perhaps, but surely an echo of Thomas Jefferson, who warned that successful democracy required people with a sense of place, a closeness to the land.

Will the Free Press centennial mark in its own small way the end of the idealized "heartland," a century crammed roughly between the bookends of homesteading and the ascendance of television tastes?

For those 100 years the heartland story was told by the Free Press. The paper was founded by my grandfather and my great-grandfather as the Adair County Democrat. One of the earliest notes was about Grandfather: "If the Democrat is not up to the standard this week our readers will excuse it as the editor has gone to Canada to marry and left the office in charge of the devil." Marriage apparently had its effect. In a few years Grandfather served in the Iowa legislature, switched to the Republican Party, changed the name of the paper. He never missed a chuckle. Item: "Charley Overholt says if the price of corn does not advance before planting time, he will raise white beans instead and sell them to the school boys for marbles." Item: "All the sick so far as we know are much better. Dr. Crosby is a dandy, professionally, of course we mean."

The crops flourished, the kids played marbles with clay commies and glassies. War intruded. Note from Nov. 21, 1918: "Mrs. Earl McCreight received a daisy blossom from Dr. G.H. McCreight, who is with the U.S. Army in France this week. It came all the way in a letter and was in good condition." Rural culture was in wonderful bloom. Already, though, the tractor, which would replace men in the fields, and the automobile, which would carry away the young folks, were making inroads in the society. By 1920 the population of Adair County had fallen by 2,000 from its peak of 16,000 in 1900. Deceptively, the town's population went up about 400, so few worried.

My mother came in 1923, on the train from Sioux City that was pulled by a stout little locomotive called the Cumberland Rose. She was a schoolteacher. When asked today why she stayed, she says simply, "It was enough." There were ladies' clubs, the church choir, a hat store, bobsleds, walnut gathering, dances, two department stores, four grocery stores, plays at the Opera House, a county fair and young men home from the war. One of them would be my father Kenneth Sidey.

He went off to the University of Missouri to study journalism. At the end of the first year, he got a wire from Grandfather telling him that because of the farm depression of 1920, the family had taken his college savings to rescue the Free Press. He would have to come home. He did, and spent the rest of his life on the paper.

Writing the story of the land and people was enough. He set up his huge Graflex in the middle of Depot Street one evening to photograph the grain elevator gloriously in flames. He parked his Ford in a cut made by a snowplow after one of the blizzards of 1936. The picture showed the snowbanks piled around the car. Every farmer with a crazy scheme to kill the swarms of grasshoppers that came with the drought got his ear. On a scorching day he watched one farmer race around his pasture with a scoop fixed on the front of a Model A. The man dumped the collected hoppers in a pile, sprayed oil on them and triumphantly set them ablaze. Father, knowing the futility of the effort, still murmured his appreciation of such energy and ingenuity, wrote the facts down in his little notebook. Story printed with picture.

When one turns the old pages, the start of World War II is clearly marked. Every contingent of draftees was lined up in front of the Trailways bus that would take them to camp. Their pictures were snapped, their names and the names of their parents faithfully recorded. In the fading volumes those placid, strong young faces form a continuing gallery.

I learned the printing trade in those years and also the discipline of small-town culture, so burdensome to Minnesota writer Sinclair Lewis but only occasionally irritating to me. I often took my place feeding the ink-caked flatbed press that would lunge back and forth printing the pages. Each press run took nearly three hours, sheet by sheet. There was no escape. All eyes bored into my back. Patience was required, craftsmanship demanded, good humor expected. On hot summer nights, after taking the papers to the post office, I would stand with my Uncle John at the makeup stone, and we would throw the old lead back into the scoops to be remelted and used again. We would sip Pepsis and talk about printing and people. It was better than school.

On winter nights when the icy west wind swept the town, I sometimes halted on my post office run to talk to Russell Piper in his tiny dry-cleaning plant. The steam and heat built up a coat of ice an inch or more thick on the windows. He was a shadowy figure behind the glacial facade. But he offered a cup of hot chocolate and unquenchable cheer, even working through the night cleaning other people's grease spots. Rural culture lived through the war.

The Free Press, with my brother at the helm, rode the ups and downs of the postwar world. For a while it looked as if Greenfield would grow dramatically. New houses went up by the score. Cattle and hog prices climbed. Grain prices soared as a hungry world sought aid. Chemical fertilizers hyped the yields. New machines snorted through the thick fields. Norman Lear, the movie producer, came around in 1969 to use the Greenfield square as a setting for his film Cold Turkey. The Free Press went Hollywood with relish, interviewing Bob Newhart, Dick Van Dyke and Tom Poston. That was before the Dutch elm disease decimated the leafy canopy over the square and left the side streets with sunstroke. Greenfield folks watched in shock as the massive elms, more than 100 years old, were cut down and hauled away. But immediately stories began to appear in the Free Press of tree-planting programs and parties. The rural society would heal itself once again.

Greenfield is still rallying. Almost weekly the paper runs a story about plans for community regeneration, the hopes for some industry to join the three small plants there now. The water supply has been upgraded with new wells and a reservoir, a campaign is under way to build an air museum for 17 antique planes collected by a local flyer. Yet in the midst of this flurry there is the vague feeling of something happening to the nation that is bigger and more menacing than anything the rural culture has faced before. It is economic. It is also spiritual.

The troubled plains states to the west -- cousins of the prairie states -- have been studied by demographers and land planners, and the preliminary findings are stunning. Frank and Deborah Popper of Rutgers University predict, "During the next generation, as a result of the largest, longest-running agricultural and environmental miscalculation in the nation's history, much of the Plains will become almost totally depopulated. The Federal Government should begin to convert vast stretches of the region to a use so old it predates the American presence -- a 'Buffalo Commons' of native grass and livestock." That will happen, insist the Poppers, because limited water was squandered to irrigate land that never should have been plowed to grow crops that were in surplus. As water runs out, both below and above the surface, as soil continues to blow away, a collapse of some sort is inevitable. The plainsmen who cling stubbornly to their windy reaches are outraged, and the argument is rumbling over the horizons. It echoes oddly around Greenfield's square, for misfortune in the plains could help Iowa.

If water shortages force an end to irrigated grain, Adair County, with its abundant rainfall and spongy soil, could gain economically. Further, a new study by the National Academy of Sciences urges the Government to structure its crop programs to move farmers away from the heavy use of pesticides, animal drugs and synthetic fertilizers, applications increasingly condemned by consumers. That study found that yields from more natural farming could be economically competitive. Farms with diversified crops and animals, rotated fields and natural fertilizers could be smaller and more labor-intensive, encouraging farm families to stay put.

One of the farmers cited in the NAS report as a good example of the new/old methods is Clark BreDahl of Adair County. "((BreDahl's)) case study illustrates that a family can still make a living today on a 160-acre diversified farm in Iowa," says the report. Wendell Berry has been suggesting something like that for two decades. His has been an eloquent voice against the agribusiness excesses.

But none of this solves the problem of contentment that is necessary for an enduring rural culture. What in today's world is "enough"? Can families set aside the blandishments of television and be satisfied again with the spectacle of nature and living close to it, with homemade entertainments and being with one another doing good work on good land? Ed Sidey thinks they can, if there is just enough money to keep people apace of the world in education and health care, if the economic base is adequate to support quality churches, parks and streets. The fundamental values still celebrated along Greenfield's streets are as sound as ever, their loss in cities the cause of human devastation, something acknowledged now by most experts.

The Adair County Free Press will continue to tell that story as it begins its second century; a couple more Sideys are coming along. The story will be in the birth notices and the deliberations of the school board, in the obituaries too. Diligent readers, like those in Greenfield, can keep tabs on who starts out on the prairies and who ends up there.