Small town

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 souls? 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 school system. I mean the one and only school.

Visiting my sister recently, 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. Don Foster, for instance, taught Citizenship, American history, physiology, high school PE and coached the boys’ and girls’ high school basketball teams. Bessie Gottschalk taught seventh and eighth grade science, home ec 1 and 2, and biology. Etc.

There were six elementary teachers, one for each grade.

The year before, Auxvasse School had undergone an enrollment growth spurt. Up until then, African-American elementary pupils attended a one-room school on the west side of the Gulf Mobile & Ohio tracks that separated the black part of town from the white. Black high school students were bused 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.

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 though my brother and sister used to tell me about 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 scout troops and two 4-H clubs.  Most of the churches had youth groups. My church was so small its youth fellowship group had to join up with two other Methodist churches from neighboring communities even smaller than Auxvasse.

Athletics were a big 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.

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, 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 rushed to the firehouse and found that someone had stolen the battery from the truck during what must have been the night watchman’s evening off. 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 high point 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. I watched it burn from the seat of my tricycle and, for years afterward, told people I wanted to be a fireman.

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 ten by ten-foot room in the concrete block structure where the fire truck was garaged. My mother and Mrs. Cowan donated most of the books, the majority 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 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 to Auxvasse last time I visited Missouri. The only businesses remaining on the town’s block-and-a-half long 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 general 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. We waved back. That’s the way folks are in small towns.

Wal-Mart 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 thanks 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. 

For 30 yearsI lived 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 boasted it 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 sophisticated businesses 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 not a real 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.