 |
| The entire third grade class of the Auxvasse School, 1959-60. That's yours truly, third from left in the middle row |
People who don’t know better think John Cougar Mellencamp’s “Small Town” is an accurate portrayal of life in a rural town. While it is accurate to some extent, it all depends on how one defines "small" because, when it comes to little towns, "small" is a relative term.
When Mellencamp was born in Seymour, Ind., in October 1951, his
small town had a population of 9,629 according to the 1950 census. When, a
month later, I made my grand entrance, my hometown, Auxvasse, Mo., had a
population of 507, one-nineteenth the
size of his. I wasn’t even born in my small town; it didn’t have a hospital.
Just how small is a town of 507? Perhaps the easiest way to
put things into context for those who can’t begin to imagine a town that small is
to start with the school. And no, I don't mean the schools. I mean the one and only school.
Last weekend while staying at my sister’s, I ran across the
Auxvasse School yearbook from 1959-60, the year she graduated from high school and
I was in the third grade.
The yearbook covered grades 1-12, which were housed in the
same building. There were 20 high school graduates that year. The entire student
body – I counted – consisted of 292 students. Most didn’t live in town; they
lived on the farms that surrounded it.
The Auxvasse School had 13 teachers – seven for
students in grades seven through 12. Going through the yearbook, I was amazed
at how many teaching hats they wore.
Doyle Wood taught American problems, world history, as well
as English and PE to seventh and eighth graders. Elizabeth Novinger taught journalism, speech, and English
1,2 and 3. (There was no English 4.) Don Foster taught citizenship, American history, physiology,
health, high school PE and coached the boys’ and girls’ basketball teams. Agnes Ferguson taught algebra, geometry, general math, seventh
grade math, and eighth grade math. Bessie Gottschalk taught seventh and eighth grade science,
biology, home ec 1, and home ec 2. Virginia Carter taught typing, bookkeeping, seventh and
eighth grade chorus, high school boys’ and girls’ chorus, high school band and
elementary band. James Breen taught seventh and eighth grade social studies,
general shop, advanced woodworking, mechanical drawing and driver’s education.
There were six elementary teachers, one for each grade. According
to the yearbook, five graduated from Northeast Missouri State Teachers College
in Kirksville and one from the University of Missouri.
The year before, Auxvasse School had undergone a growth spurt in terms of enrollment. Up until then, African-American elementary pupils attended a
one-room school on the west side of the GM&O tracks that separated the black
part of town from the white. Black high school students were bussed 35 miles to
Jefferson City to a school run by Lincoln University, a
teacher’s college for African-Americans. The year I started second grade, the
schools were integrated. Of the 20 pupils in my third grade class, five were African-American.
The 1959-60 yearbook was made possible by local businesses
whose ads appeared on the final pages. Most were purchased by businesses in
nearby Mexico and Fulton, the county seat. The only ads from Auxvasse merchants
were placed by the Security Bank (“Capital & Surplus of $75,000 and Undivided
Profits of $450,000”), Divers Food Store & Elevator, the Chalet (“Your
Favorite Eating Spot”), Dryden’s General Merchandise, Hunt & Moser
Chrysler-Plymouth, LaCrosse Lumber Co., Maupin Funeral Home, Welch’s Tavern,
Wilbur Foster Trucking & Ice, the Kingdom Telephone Co., Hape’s Locker (“Custom
Slaughtering & Meat Processing”), Baumgartner’s Furniture & Appliances,
the Auxvasse Review, Andy Briggs Real Estate, Bill’s Garage and Dr. A.H. Domann.
There were a handful of other businesses – three gas stations, a café, hardware
store, drug store, grocery store and a lawyer that, for some reason – probably
economic – didn’t buy ads.
Auxvasse was so small it didn’t even have a conventional
traffic signal. There was a blinking red light suspended above the intersection
of U.S. 54 and the farm-to-market road, to keep travelers from speeding through
the mile-long town in under a minute.
The Auxvasse I grew up in had no movie theater – it still
doesn’t – though my brother and sister remember one that lasted a short time in
the late 1940s. There was no bowling alley, community pool or skating rink
either. Kids’ activities consisted of Girl and Boy Scout troops and two 4-H clubs,
the Advancers and Crusaders. Most of the churches had youth groups. My church
was so small that its youth fellowship group had to join up with two other
Methodist churches from neighboring communities even smaller than Auxvasse.
Athletics were a big – make that huge – part of life in our
small town. There was Little League in summer (I was relegated to right field
and missed both pop flies that came my way during my short career), high school
basketball in winter, and baseball and track in spring, even through the school
didn’t have a track. Heck, the school didn’t even have a gymnasium until 1954. Before
then, basketball games were played outside and there were no physical education
classes.
There were no police in Auxvasse, but there was a night
watchman who rode through town in his own vehicle, keeping an eye out for
crime, but there rarely was any to be found.
Nor was there a fire department but there was a fire truck,
a vintage model from the late twenties or early thirties that had been purchased
third-hand from another small town. It had wooden-spoke wheels. Whenever there
was fire in or around town, the siren went off and all the able-bodied men within
earshot were expected to show up at the firehouse and follow the truck to the
fire to fight it. One day when the alarm
sounded, the men of Auxvasse rushed to the firehouse and found that someone had
stolen the battery from the truck. Needless to say, the house they had hoped to
save burned to the ground and the thief was never caught by the police because
there weren’t any police.
The unequivocal highlight of my childhood was the day the
Presbyterian Church at the end of our street burned down despite the best efforts
of amateur firefighters from Auxvasse and the professionals from Mexico and Fulton.
There were no fire hydrants, so the firemen quickly used up the water they had brought
to the scene on their trucks.
Sometime around 1960, Tippy Cowan, the wife of the local
hardware store owner, decided Auxvasse needed some culture and started a town library
in a 10’ x 10’ room in the concrete block structure where the fire truck was garaged.
My mother and Mrs. Cowan donated most of the books, the majority of which were from the Reader’s Digest Condensed series. The library was open one afternoon a week and I rarely
encountered anyone other than Mrs. Cowan when I went to check out one of mom’s
condensed books. Every two weeks the bookmobile from the Daniel Boone Library
in Columbia came to town for an hour or so, but few people took advantage of
it.
Auxvasse had five churches – the aforementioned Methodist,
one Disciples of Christ, one Presbyterian and two Baptist, one for whites, one
for blacks. The ladies of the African-American Second Baptist Church served a fund-raising lunch one Saturday every month and my father always bought plates
of fried chicken, vinegary greens and slices of meringue-topped pies and
brought them back to his store. The Disciples of Christ ladies were famous for
the chicken potpie they served with raspberry Jell-O salad every Halloween.
The morning after Halloween, Auxvasse residents invariably woke
up to find half a dozen or so outhouses – not everyone had indoor plumbing even
in the 1960s – pranksters had hoisted onto pick-up flatbeds, brought to Main
Street and set afire.
The highlight of Auxvasse’s social calendar year was the Lion’s Club Fair held in July. A carnival set up five or six rusty rides in
the town park which wasn’t really a park – it was nothing more than a couple
of acres of vacant land next to a smelly feed lot. Members of Callaway County’s
many 4-H clubs brought cows, horses and hogs (which were always referred to as
“swine”) to the fair for judging. Those deemed “best of show” were sold to the
local slaughterhouse and the kids who raised them posed proudly for pictures
that would appear in the Auxvasse Review
just before the animal was led away to its doom. Woodworking, home canning and
baking projects completed by 4-H members were displayed on the bleachers of the
gym for all to admire and for judges to award ribbons of merit. The window box
I made during my brief stint as a Crusader -- I’ll come clean here, my dad
built it in about five minutes and he, if possible, was even worse at carpentry
than I am today -- won a white ribbon, the lowest possible award.
The fair culminated on Saturday night with a dance at which some folks drank too much, wound up dancing with people who weren’t their
significant others and/or got into fistfights, providing gossip fodder for
months afterward.
My sister and I drove through Auxvasse last weekend. The
only businesses remaining on the town’s block and a half business district are
the bank, tavern and phone company. The rest of Main Street’s buildings are
empty. Even though it was a Saturday afternoon which, when I was a kid, was the
day farmers and their families came to town to stock up on provisions for the
coming week, there wasn’t a soul to be seen. As we were looking into the window
of what was once our father’s store, a car stopped at the stop light and the
driver waved but we didn’t know him and he didn't he know us. That’s just the way
folks are in small towns.
Wal-Mart pretty much destroyed businesses in Auxvasse and
other small towns throughout rural America. There are Wal-Marts in both Fulton
and Mexico, which, like Auxvasse, once had thriving commercial districts,
businesses run by local merchants that provided good jobs for residents. Those
businesses have shuttered their doors in large part due to the chain founded by
Sam Walton who grew up in Shelbina, another small town about sixty miles north
of Auxvasse. Most small town Missourians are proud one of their own founded
Wal-Mart. I am not among them because Wal-Mart, more than anything, is the
reason so many small towns in the Midwest and south have fallen on hard times.
I spent 30 years in Wilton, Conn., a leafy, affluent, stuffy suburb of 17,000 an hour northeast of Manhattan. Its residents like
to claim in letters to the editor of the local paper that they live in a small
town, something this guy from an honest-to-God small town always found
hilarious. Wilton has some of the highest-rated public schools in the United
States and almost every student not only goes on to college but to graduate
school. Whereas the bank in my small town had capital of $75,000, the town my
kids grew up in was home of AIG Financial Products whose greed-induced downfall
– the US government had to put up $180 billion to enable the company to unwind its positions -- contributed mightily
to the 2008 global financial crash.
Real small towns don’t have companies like that, nor do their
residents work for hedge funds or investment banks as many folks in Wilton do. Real
small towners don’t sip coffee at Starbucks, dine in Japanese restaurants, or
hang out at wine bars eating tapas. Real small towners don’t have to visit a
town-owned “farm” to see pigs and cows that are brought in for kids to pet once
a year; they raise their own. Real small town high schools don't have ski teams or lacrosse teams nor will you ever sit next to anyone famous at your kid's school concert, sporting event or theater production.
Wilton is by no stretch of the imagination a small town – at
least not to me. But, I suppose, to someone who grew up in Brooklyn or Long
Island, as many of its residents did, it might be.
Like I said, small is a relative term when it comes to towns.
