A while back (a couple of years ago or so), I ran into Dolores Cullen at a local antique shop I haunt. I’m not sure why I did it, but I told her “Art ought to write a book. I love his writing”. I love writing in general, usually preferring fiction. Dolores responded, indicating to me that she’d heard the question before, “Do you think it should be essays or editorials?” I thought for a second and answered “both”.
Then he went and won that Pulitzer prize.
When I met Art, I didn’t know he was a newspaper guy and in fact, I didn’t know who he was. I was trying to keep my baby store alive after a series of setbacks-a bogus eviction from a spot by a guy who wanted to start a restaurant there, and a couple of other setbacks which would eventually include two break-ins that would finish the place off. It was a retail music store where I was trying to peddle record albums when there WEREN’T any record albums. He would visit me on Saturdays when I clerked my doomed second counter (the two stores were my hobby, not my “real job”). He wasn’t a big spender, which I now realize was because he had relatively empty pockets, but that was ok-I needed to care about sales because my partner was about ready to leave me and/or demand we close the store, but Art was a wonderful conversationalist and that was good enough for me. Good conversationalists are hard to find.
Eventually I discovered that he was a wild-eyed liberal newspaper guy. That was interesting to me because I liked to read some newspapers, mainly the Des Moines Register during the years that they ran Donald Kaul’s column and a newspaper in Spencer had given my son a job as a photographer (using my 35mm camera which I couldn’t seem to master) and my brother was a newspaper guy in Montana. In addition to being a newspaper guy, Art was a music fan and there’s no better kind of guy than that hanging at the counter of a music store of course.
At the time, I wasn’t from Storm Lake, so I wasn’t really cultivating social contacts or even reading Storm Lake news but I was happy to meet another music fan of his caliber. From my vantage point of two record stores, those were the only people I really met who held my interest.
Things evolved and happened, which could probably be a book of their own if I cared to step into the autobiographical or nonfiction world and I needed to take care of some “stuff” like a divorce, the collapse of that Storm Lake store, a near bankruptcy and the evaporation of my “real job”, as well as some personal adjustments I needed to make over my overusage of the world’s most dangerous drug, ethyl alcohol. All that took a few years. I eventually got back on my feet, and moved to Storm Lake, taking up residence with a woman who recently passed away and who should have inspired a book of her own, which is yet another tangent.
I grew up in Spencer, although I had spent a great deal of time in Storm Lake with grandparents and an eight year residence on Hickory Lane, where I was being assimilated into the family business as a third generation guy who might eventually ascend to piloting the ship if we just didn’t sell the place, which of course we eventually did do. In my lifetime, there was quite a Spencer-Storm Lake rivalry, due largely in part to a couple of really tall high school basketball players that Storm Lake had on their basketball team. The Spencer and Storm Lake factions of our business had a good-natured rivalry and until we combined those two branches at Spencer, I was happy to participate.
On the same day that Storm Lake’s Hygrade plant closed, we executed that consolidation and although I had a little trouble moving to Spencer due to insanely high interest rates, I did move to Royal in 1983, where housing was more affordable. With the exception of me stomping around Storm Lake handling sales duties as the Son Of A Bitch From The Home Office, that ended my Storm Lake affiliation for a while until I returned to launch music store number two.
Hygrade remained closed for a while, and IBP eventually came along and busted the union, and packing plants in Spencer and Estherville just vanished. Spencer wanted nothing more to do with that industry. Things began to change, and Storm Lake became what we call multi-cultural.
I like multi-cultural places; I’d always felt that I was suffocating in northwest Iowa and my only reprieve from that came with my four year stay in Iowa City from 1969 to 1973, where I damn near threw it all away chasing a raven-haired beauty in a bar. She was a waitress-we hadn’t changed that job description to server yet.
But it was a Spencer thing to do to point at Storm Lake and deride the town for going all to pot because suddenly it wasn’t homogeneous. That reminded me of how we had looked at Iowa City, although we also hated the place because of the large anti-war faction there. War is good for the economy you know.
My Spencer friends and many of the “old Storm Lake” people still do that. I usually cringe, but never was particularly vocal about my opposition to that kind of myopic thinking, because I was mostly into counter cultural stuff and the evil Left Coast scene.
We have to fast forward to now, when Art wrote his book, Storm Lake: A Chronicle of Change, Resilience, and Hope from a Heartland Newspaper. I had stormed the residence of the woman with whom I eventually lived for thirteen years and she lived at “the outlet” of the lake where I would see Art go by on his bicycle (he turned around at the outlet and rode back to town from there) but I left him alone when I saw him because by that time I knew he was a busy newspaper guy and was probably accosted too frequently by people who both agreed and disagreed with him about politics in particular. I was in the “agree” camp, but it was of no importance-I have no political credentials. I knew him as a music aficionado. From time to time he insisted that I had to visit a little bar in Pomeroy, Byron’s, the Iowa Deadhead capital (I’m a Deadhead). I didn’t go there because I couldn’t. I was living with a woman I didn’t feel I could leave alone very long, again, a story worthy of its own book, although I don’t really want to write that book. I want to write Catch-22, even though Joseph Heller already did.
The book came out three days ago and I finished it last night. I’ve seen several remarks that it’s a fast read, and it is. Somehow, he has written a book full of history that’s accessible by people who hate history, based on their high school experience with that subject. But it’s a lot more than that-it’s about Big Agriculture, running a newspaper which of course must produce revenue but without compromising principles, and most importantly, how Storm Lake became multicultural and why that’s a good thing. Not enough music commentary in my opinion, but maybe that’s book number two and anyway, the music commentary is about another town, an oasis in a sea of “rednecks”.
Due to a recent chain of events, I could very well return to Spencer in the coming months, but I will return as a witness of some incredibly powerful social experimentation which in my opinion is wildly successful.
Iowa doesn’t have to be mind-numbingly all-the-same, and it probably never was. While we bemoan the impact of immigration that we actually can’t understand, WE are the immigrants. Cullen has been careful to point that out and he’s specific about how we’ve raped our land and become loathsome ourselves, although he stops short of actually saying that loathsome part.
If you live in northwest Iowa, you should probably read this book. For me, it defines where I am, and I’ve always wondered about that part, particularly because many of my friends from more “interesting” parts of the country have always asked me what in the hell am I doing here. I have always said I’m trapped, but today I feel more like I belong here. It’s a bigger book than that though. It works for anyone who is anywhere in Iowa and it also works for anyone in our country who’s more than slightly interested in why the heartland is important and vital.
The book probably works internationally as well. After my forced retirements from slinging wholesale groceries and retail music (because distribution conglomerates good with spreadsheets took over and Main Street is broken) I moved my economic activity to the internet where roughly a third of my business is international. I’m sensitive about the ugly American stereotype, although you rarely hear that phrase any more, and again, Cullen has not used those words. I care about what many so-called conservatives condemn as globalism.
I care about being represented by racists, and I care about politics dominated by money. I’ve had money and I can tell you that chasing the stuff is a grave mistake.
Buy the book. It’s insightful, often self-deprecating, and entertaining, even when it names weeds. I wish I’d read it years ago, before it even existed.
