News From Home: Where Is Everybody?

Dateline Grandview Iowa:  KWQC, your Hawkeye News Leader, reported that "Crews battle major fire downtown Grandview, Iowa."  And "Several fire crews were called to assist in battling a massive fire in downtown Grandview, Iowa Friday evening."

Grandview is the little town where my family lived after we moved out of the trailer park in Colorado Springs, and before we moved to the Philippines.  

The town was mostly farms, and right across the street from our house was a Roosevelt-era elementary school that was built to withstand the end of the world.  That's where my Mom taught.

Like a lot of Iowa towns, when we lived there Grandview didn't celebrate Halloween on October 31st, but instead had a "Beggar's Night" on October 30th, which saved my parents all kinds of fuss because they could pretend all the costumes and candy were for my birthday.

Oddly, this little own also had one of the most spectacular fireworks display in the state. I don't know how this was worked out, but every year the fireworks people would set up in one of those farmer's fields and by the time the show reached it's crescendo, it felt like the end of the world.

When business took me near the area many years ago, I went by the old place and, as I have recounted before, it was like walking onto the set for the pilot for the Twilight Zone.  The "Where Is Everybody?" episode where Earl Holliman returns to his home town to find it recently abandoned.  And by recently, I mean just a few minutes prior.  There are cigars still smouldering in ashtrays and music and voices coming from shops, but when he investigates there is no one there.

This was exactly my experience visiting Grandview.  

No one to be found anywhere.  The town's one restaurant was open,  the door was unlocked, there were a few jackets hung up on the rack, steam coming from the kitchen, but no one anywhere.  Ditto the little store where I had once gotten in trouble pretending a piece of cardboard I had written my name on was a "credit card".  And that Roosevelt-era school where my mom taught was not just empty, but long abandoned.  The doors were open, so I went in and it was just so sad.  Classroom furniture covered with plastic tarps that had gone cracked and yellow and murly with age.  The gym was empty, and the wooden floor deeply scuffed from long ago when it had been used for indoor horseshoes.  There was a trophy case, still full of rusting medals and statues from decades ago, and a half-melted sugar cube replica of the state capitol that someone had put a lot of effort into building in 1969.

The reason the KWQC story resonated with me was that they called this a "major fire" and "a massive fire" that took place in "downtown Grandview".

But there isn't really any "downtown" in Grandview.  

Chicago has a downtown.  Chicago is a city of 2.697 million people, and it definitely has a downtown.  I lived in Chicago for many years and if you and I were there right now, I could show you around the downtown and tell you the stories of the Great Fire, which wiped out virtually the entire city and is commemorated by the second of the six-pointed stars in the Chicago flag.

I could also tell you of Iroquois Theater fire and the Eastland disaster.  Show you where they happened.

Springfield, where I live now, has 113,394 residents and also has a recognizable downtown.  And right now a lot of us are working on ways to keep it from dying. 

For 60 years, "Mayberry" has been a stand in for very small town rural America.  According a sign posted at the railroad station in a Season 8 episode, the fictional town of Mayberry had a population of 5,360.

I took you from Chicago to Springfield to Mayberry to sled you down a steep curve that will help you understand how very small Grandview is.

When I lived in Grandview 60 years ago, it had a population of 300.  Sixty years later, Grandview has a population of 437.  And while I am not suggesting for one minute that the loss of a "post office, a bar, apartment complex, and a city shed" isn't a terrible thing to happen to the residents of Grandview, I'm not sure it rises fo the level of a "massive fire".

Also, Grandview doesn't really have a "downtown" as most of us understand it.  It has the same, few commercial buildings that it had 60 years ago, clustered together on a Main Street that is maybe two blocks long before it trails of into farm country and becomes County Road 252.     In fact, according to Google maps, Grandview barely exists at all.  You can look it up and Google will take you there, but as soon as you drop the little yellow "Street View" guy on the map, Google tells you that you're in Wapello, Iowa (pop. 2048),  which you are very much not. 

Some years after my Where Is Everybody? experience, my sibs and our late mother had occasion to be in Iowa again, and we went past Grandview again.  The town still looked deserted, and the school still stood empty -- fallen trophy cases and all -- but now an elderly couple had purchased either the entire property or a piece of it with the goal of converting it into apartments or luxury lofts or condos.  Someplace people who might have fond memories of the town would enjoy coming back to.  Might get a kick out of living in their old classroom. 

By a wild coincidence the woman knew and remembered my mom from back in the early 1960s when they were both members of the same social club (The Lucky 7s?).  Her husband, who was not around at that moment, was a farmer and carpenter who had been active is pretty much every civic organization the town had, and was, I believe, the mayor of the place at that time.

They had renovated one corner of the building on the first floor; the former attendance and principal's offices.  They were living there and it looked...well, like someone had tidied up the circa-1930s elementary school attendance and principal's offices, hung some drapes, moved in some bedroom and living room furniture, and set up a kitchen area.  I don't know that the renovation project ever made it past that one corner of the first floor, and both the husband and wife passed away some years later.

If you've followed me this far you're probably expecting an ending to this story.  And you have every right to.  But I'm not sure I have one for you, except maybe this.

For me, Grandview is a few flashes of childhood memory.  Not enough of a critical mass to create nostalgia -- not enough to make me long for that past or ever want to live there -- but to recognize it for what it once was, and to be saddened that it has become one of those thousands of way-off-the-highway towns where whatever was once considered the American dream went into stasis decades ago and is slowly dying off.  To understand how very different my life might have turned out -- how very different my belief system may have been -- had my family taken root and stayed there.  

On the other hand, I have this image of an elderly couple who lived in that little town their whole lives and loved it there.  An elderly couple who spent their last remaining years pouring their energy and money into trying to take something old and abandoned and remake it into something that would bring people back to their dying town.  To build something that could capture and pass along their pride and sense-of-place to a new generation.  

And in that impulse -- to preserve, cheish, renew and bequeath -- I find a some hope.

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