I DID NOT GROW UP IN Southern Iowa. A year after I was born in the hospital in Sigourney, Iowa, my dad got a job in what was then called Northwest Iowa Technical College, just outside of Sheldon, Iowa. My parents bought a big old white house just across from the City Park. From what I understand, the move was not permanent in their minds, but life does what it does, and 42 years later my dad still lives in Sheldon, albeit in a smaller house.
Sheldon is not Southern Iowa; it is the full embodiment of Northwest Iowa, a different beast entirely. But I sort of consider myself an honorary Southern Iowan: At least 4-5 times a year, Mom and Dad would throw the four of us in the back of the family station wagon, a bright green 1977 Plymouth Volare, strap suitcases to the top Clark Griswold-style, and haul us all down to spend time with family in Southern Iowa.
We'd go visit my dad's mom, Helen, who lived in another small Southern Iowa town, Lovilia. Compared to Clarkdale, Lovilia was a metropolis, home to six or seven hundred people, with a Casey's and even a school. My Aunt Elaine was in the last senior graduating class of Lovilia High School, in 1962; my dad went through eighth grade and rode the bus to Albia, a bigger town nine miles south, and 30 miles north of Centerville, for high school. When I was a boy, the school served kids only through 4th grade; now, no one goes to school there, and a self-proclaimed musician who says he's related to me lives there.
Like Clarkdale, Lovilia's boom times were when the coal mines were in full swing in the early 20th century. My dad's ancestors came not to mine, however, but as part of the Homestead Act of the 1860's, whereby the United States Federal Government doled out 160-acre portions of land to families willing to work the land for five years. Eager to escape distrust and outright bigotry towards the Irish back East, my dad's descendants took the plunge. Although my dad grew up a "town kid", many of his aunts and uncles were still farming in the 1950's and 60's when he was growing up, and he learned the farming work ethic.
My dad, Ron, son of Helen and Orvil, who died in 1956 from a heart complication due to a childhood infection, had met my mom, Connie, daughter of Mike and Maxine, at a dance in downtown Centerville when my mom was a high school junior and my dad was studying at the local community college. Three years later, they married. My dad had been drafted and decided to join the Air Force for a four year tour, the first two of which they spent in what was then West Germany, and the latter two in South Carolina. Having served his time, my dad got a teaching job in New Sharon, Iowa; four years later came the move to Sheldon.
Our six-hour drive forays into Southern Iowa were frequent and varied; sometimes we'd stay just 36 hours or so, for some occasion; sometimes, in the summer, my brother and I would be there for ten days, staying with my grandma and aunts and uncles. Mainly we'd stay in Lovilia, but sometimes we'd stay in Ankeny with my Aunt Elaine. My mom's ten siblings were quite literally spread out over the whole country: Nebraska, Michigan, North Carolina, Indiana--and we rarely saw them. Two of them, however, had stayed in Centerville, Maxine's two oldest kids from her first marriage. We'd stop over and see Uncle Wesley and play our cousin Kirk's Atari and play ping pong; but when we went to Centerville, we always stayed at my Aunt Loretta's house a block off Highway 2.
And then, sometimes, we'd even go to Mystic.
No comments:
Post a Comment