The Tragedy of the Ridgeway School

One of the events of Kuntz Days in Ridgeway was the “tour” of Ridgeway Elementary School. The description on the flyer was “A discussion of the future of our school.” As I walked to the school, I thought that this would be about drumming up support for a millage election or an introduction to some refurbishing plans and a plea for donations.

Instead, I arrived in the school’s lobby and found…nothing. The lights were off. The classroom doors were open, showing vast expanses of bare linoleum. In the lobby sat an old man dressed in a black and gold garrison cap and a matching windbreaker. He talked with the people in front of me about how he thought the school building could be made into apartments. Then the people in front of me walked into the school, and I followed them.

A little girl in the crowd had apparently gone to the school, and from what I picked up the school had been closed down the year before. Her parents and relatives all asked her what had been in each classroom, and to hear her remembering who had taught what class in what room was kind of heartbreaking.  She had obviously had some good memories in this place, and now it was abandoned.

Before closing down the school, the people in charge had taken all the equipment they deemed necessary. Whiteboards had been removed from the blackboards, leaving evenly spaced circular pockmarks of adhesive, and most rooms had nothing in them. One had an old wooden desk that would have been considered old in the 1970s, and there was one classroom with a few chairs thrown in the center, as though they had been grouped together and forgotten.

Then I got to the library, and I started to get mad.

You could tell it was the library for two reasons. The first was because of the shelves in the room. The second was because the books were still in them. Stacks and stacks of children’s books, gathering dust in an abandoned school building, for some reason considered less important to take than tables and chairs. I was incredulous. How could they just let the books rot here? Couldn’t they have donated them to a library or sold them or even given the things away to children who could have gotten some use out of them? But no, they just sat there, waiting in vain for some child to pick them up and discover the worlds they contained.

I have by and large tried to keep from putting my personal opinions in this blog. I have tried really hard, because this blog is supposed to be about the interesting , wonderful and occasionally ridiculous things that go on in this little corner of the United States, but I have to say something here. In 2010, the Department of Defense received 705 billion dollars to keep functioning. That’s about 20% of the Federal Government’s budget. Education, on the other hand, nets a whopping 3% of the government’s budget. According to the Department of Education’s website, about 10.8% of each state’s education is funded by the Federal government. The rest comes from the individual state.

With this recession, Congress has talked an awful lot about needing to cut programs, especially programs like social security, Medicare and Medicaid. To be fair, about 20% of the U.S. budget goes to Social Security, and 21% goes to Medicare, Medicaid and CHIP. But with all the screaming politicians have done about us needing to cut Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, along with everything else, the Defense and Security budget remains untouched. Because, after all, we are surrounded by big scary enemies lurking out in the world who are going to kill us if we take so much as a five spot from the Defense budget. Meanwhile, schools across the country are being closed due to lack of funding.

If you look at the more successful dictatorships in human history, you might notice they have two main strategies for controlling the population. Keep them scared, and keep them stupid.

Draw your own conclusions.

Kuntz Days in Ridgeway

If there’s one thing that is becoming synonymous with summer, it’s the local round of fairs. As far as I can tell, almost every state has a state fair. One of the exceptions is unfortunately Michigan, whose state Fair was shut down in 2009. But out in the breadbasket of America, the state fair is alive and well. It is particularly alive and well in Minnesota, which has the third largest fair in the United States. The first two are in Texas, which seems fitting somehow. If you’re curious, the Iowa state fair comes in at 18.

The next step down from state fairs are the county fairs. In northeast Iowa two of them dominate the public consciousness. Howard County, home of Cresco, has a large one that lasts for a week. So does Winneshiek County, home of Decorah. Both feature roughly the same things—livestock, fair food, rigged games you’ll have fun trying to win and fair rides which were last inspected for safety sometime in the 1970s, a fact you’ll only really think about when the g-forces are hitting your body at the apex of the ride. Have fun!

After the county fairs are the much less well-known “town celebrations.” These are fairs offered up by towns. Ostensibly they celebrate an aspect of the town, but the reality is everyone loves a chance to get out and party. So in Lime Springs you have Sweet Corn Days, in Chester you have Old Settlers Days, and in Ridgeway you have Kuntz Days.

Over the weekend, I had the choice of going to either the Old Settlers Days or Kuntz Days, or heading down to the comic book store in Cedar Falls. But I was curious. What kind of events do they have? What do they celebrate?

My first choice was Old Settlers Days in Chester, but then I saw a flyer for Kuntz Days in Ridgeway. A little asking around revealed that one Everett Kuntz had written a book about Ridgeway or something to that effect. Then I went to the Howard County website and looked at the events of the day for Old Settlers Days. The events in question were not quite even remotely connected with Old Settlers. The main event was a Tractor Pull. Another main event—a Children’s Tractor Pull. While this had every opportunity for comedy, I decided to go to Ridgeway instead. After all, someone wrote a book about Ridgeway, a community that is most known for being between Cresco and Decorah. According to Wikipedia it has around 300 people, give or take 100. So I headed out to Ridgeway, waiting to see just what would be in store.

Usually when I drive through Ridgeway to get to Decorah, it’s a quick two-minute drive through Highway 9. I enter around an area owned by the Winneshiek Co-op and exit around the Winneshiek Park, a name which I would think Decorah might take issue with. It’s not often that a small community establishes its park as the county park, but Ridgeway had done it. Perhaps there was something to this town of which I was unaware.

As I had so many times before, I zipped into Ridgeway passing the Winneshiek Co-op grain silos. Two minutes later, I zipped past Winneshiek park without seeing any sign of a celebration. Crap. I turned my car around and drove back along Highway 9, only this time I turned down a random side street. I knew from experience there was some kind of community, and the town was small enough that if I went down enough back roads there would have to be some sign of a celebration if any existed.

Two blocks later I found exactly what I was looking for. To be honest it wasn’t a big celebration. It wasn’t even a medium-sized one. Let’s face it, in a town where there are 300 people you can’t expect a big turnout. I’d say maybe 200 people were there, but that might be overstating things a bit. Still, this wasn’t about numbers, it was about celebrating. I parked the car and immediately grabbed a brat, potato chips and soda sold by the Ridgeway fire department to begin partaking in the celebration. I’ve always thought bratwursts are the ideal standard of fair food, at least for adults. They’re portable in a way hamburgers aren’t, and they have a number of ways they can be topped. They’re also taste a lot better than a hotdog. Hotdogs taste kind of bland, and they’re all about the toppings you can put on them to disguise the fact that you’re eating a hotdog. Brats, though, brats are salty and meaty, and in my opinion a little sauerkraut and mustard only enhances the flavor, although you really shouldn’t put on much sauerkraut and mustard on your brats. If you do, you should at least make sure you have a place to sit down so the kraut and mustard doesn’t get all over your hands and on your jacket. These are the kinds of tips Miss Manners never talks about, by the way.

As I was trying to wipe the excess mustard and sauerkraut off my hands and my jacket I arrived at the community center, where all the action was. In the street there were a bunch of kids’ games, like musical chairs, a beanbag toss and a “fishing” wall. There was also a bouncy castle that seemed to work intermittently, causing the adults on at least one occasion to rush to it and hold it up while trying not to panic the children inside while the owner got the blower working again. This is another aspect of small town life that makes me smile—if this had happened at the Minnesota State Fair, the attraction would have been shut down for fear of lawsuits while they tried to figure out what the problem was and convince people it wouldn’t happen again. Here, though, as soon as the blower was working, the kids got back inside and the adults let them. Sometimes bouncy castles fail, and when they do you deal with the situation and then get back to celebrating.

The center of the Kuntz Days celebration was the Ridgeway Community Center. It was easily the nicest building in Ridgeway, and true to its word it had a lot of community stuff going on. The local 4-H had a bake sale in there, and I bought a cookie to show solidarity. In another section there was a nail-biter of a bingo game going on, or so I judged by the fact that everyone was staring at their bingo cards as though the instructions to the Ark of the Covenant were written on them.

Far more interesting, though, was the collection of photographs taken by one Everett Kuntz. As it turns out, my source was wrong—he did not write any book about Ridgeway. Instead, he took a lot of pictures of the Ridgeway community circa 1939. By a lot, I mean enough to cover three tables. According to one website on the subject, he had over 2,000 negatives when he finally got around to getting them developed. At some point later, they came to the notice of one Jim Heynen, who took the pictures, created some vignettes about what was going on in them, and published the book as “Sunday Afternoon on the Porch: Reflections of a Small Town in Iowa, 1939-1942.” You can find it on Amazon if you’re so inclined.

The photographs do what photographs do best—preserve a moment in time. And with any photograph of people you don’t know, there’s a sense of mystery. There’s a shot of a young man and a young woman on stage, with another man dressed more formally seeming to announce something. The title is, “The Engagement.” Just like that, there’s a story there—who were these people? How did they meet? What did they do to support themselves? What was the wedding like? Did they have a happy marriage?

There are other photographs—people working, people taking, people living their lives before World War II, unaware that someday people in 2011 their lives would be a snapshot of what might be considered a simpler time. It’s very alluring—you can see how people could want to visit the world in those photographs, where people were friendly with each other and where everyone is smiling or busy working on something. No wonder people want to return to the “Good Old Days,” which never seem to be the days that are ahead. But those people had their problems, too. The date was 1939, the waning days of the Great Depression. Two years later, the Japanese would bomb Pearl Harbor and we’d be introduced to one of the monsters of history.

Really, though, the photos are an excuse to get together and party. That’s a good thing. One of the things Everett Kuntz’s photos shows are people getting together and enjoying one another’s company, and there are quite a few reasons not to do that as it is. I think a community getting together and getting to know their neighbors is well in the spirit of what the photos convey, and I think it’s something Mr. Kuntz would appreciate.

Leuthold's, Optimism and Eternal Sales

I’ve been trying to come up with some way to describe Leuthold’s so readers will understand why I think it’s so neat. It’s proving unexpectedly difficult.

Let me start at the beginning—Leuthold’s is an upscale clothing store, somewhat of a half-step between AmberCrombie & Fitch and a Men’s Wearhouse, plus whatever the feminine equivalent is. It’s a pretty small store, too—maybe no more than a quarter of the size of any clothing store in the mall. I might be willing to go up to a third, but my point is this store is smaller than any other clothing store I’ve seen.

Despite its size, Leuthold’s isn’t cluttered. I don’t know how they pulled this off, but the fact they did is a minor miracle. You have clothing racks advertising the latest fashions for teenagers and twentysomethings in the front, and about halfway in you get to the fancy clothes—suit jackets, ties, slacks, whole suits for heaven’s sakes—by name-brand suit manufacturers. Your average farmer can walk in there fresh off the fields and walk out looking as though he was ready to go to a photoshoot or to senior prom.

What is really impressive about Leuthold’s is that it stands out like a beacon in a choice of let’s say “less-than-high-fashion” options. If you’re looking for clothes in Cresco, Alco is pretty much the place to go.  They have your standard Wal-Mart selection, although you can just drive to Decorah and pick up your clothes from an actual Wal-Mart, my preferred tactic. As one of my brothers noted, his secret to fashion success is to go to Ambercrombie and Fitch, see what the latest styles are, then go to Wal-Mart and pick up one of their knock-offs for much, much less. It’s a tactic I’ve cribbed.

Decorah also has its own J.C. Penney, which is noteworthy by itself. It follows the same business model as Leuthold’s—pack a standard clothing store into an area about a quarter of what it occupies normally. Unlike Leuthold’s though, the Decorah J.C. Penney is a bit more…crowded, let’s say. Crowded to the point it doesn’t cater to fat people, because there is no way anyone with excess body fat can fit down the rows. In fact, two people can’t really fit down the rows unless they’re on exceptionally good terms with one another or are veteran contortionists.

Still, the Decorah J.C. Penney’s has managed to fit everything that would be in a J.C. Penney store in the mall into a small little corner location, which is impressive. Its’ also impressive that they’ve abandoned the usual carpet and wood paneling of J.C. Penney’s for wire racks and an interior that looks as though it was constructed sometime in the 1930s. The combined effect is incredible, as though this J.C. Penney was one of the seasonal Halloween stores that springs up in deserted storefronts, only this store isn’t going anywhere.

The J.C. Penney also has sales. Every week there is another sale, advertised in the store windows. I can safely say I’ve seen more sales offered in the J.C. Penney store than in any other store so far. Perhaps more than any other store ever. I haven’t driven by the store in a month and I still know it’s going to have a sale. I like to keep tabs on the store, because I know there will be a point when they offer multiple sales, and I’ll get to take 30% off an item that was already marked down 20%.

So the good people of Cresco have plenty of shopping choices, including the local Dollar General. But Leuthold’s stands head and shoulders above them for its attitude. Having grown up in and around small towns, I remember all the times I’ve had to go clothes shopping and they have all been in Decorah-sized towns. If I tried to buy clothes in my hometown I could probably get a baseball cap. Maybe some canvas work gloves. Leuthold’s though, stands as a beacon of optimism. The owners almost have to believe that people want to look nice, that they will have events in their lives for which they want to look nice, and it prepares them for that possibility. In areas like Decorah this is les s a bet and more of a certainty, but in a small town you also have to assume that not only will people have these events, they will have them several times throughout their lives and that they’ll even want to look nice when they go out on the weekends. Believe me when I say this is not always the case.

So Leuthold’s has bet on this happening in a community of about 5,000. So far, they’ve won their bet, and it doesn’t look like they’re going to lose anytime soon. While you might say it’s just good business, I prefer to say it’s proof that optimism can pay off.

Low Dining

I was coming back from Decorah today after purchasing a CD and I passed the Su-Z-Q s, a popular teen hangout in Cresco. Almost instantly, I knew what I was going to be writing about this week. I’ve written about the fine dining in Decorah, and some of the more interesting restaurants in Cresco. I have not, however, written about the low dining opportunities.

Low dining is a favorite topic of mine, owing in large part to what I humbly call “Chris’s Rule of Eating Out.” This simple rule states  that the likelihood of a restaurant ripping off a diner increases as the price of the meal gets closer to the price of an iPad. Low cost meals can be fun and may give you a more interesting atmosphere than you would get in more upscale restaurants. Still, you have to be careful. Otherwise, you may end up eating at Su-Z-Qs.

The primary food Su-Z-Q’s offers is grease. Deep-fried food rules the menu like Kim Jong-Il rules North Korea, although you will find the teenage staples of hamburgers somewhere on the menu, carving out a kind of No-Man’s-Land on the grill. There may be hotdogs on the menu too, but if I had to double check it I would actually have to go in the restaurant again, and I really don’t want to. I went there once, had the shrimp basket with a salad and a coke. I don’t want to be any more disparaging than I’ve already been, but when your waitress drops a small plastic bowl full of shredded lettuce in front of you along with a plastic cup of dressing, you know you’re not in for the greatest dining experience ever. On the other hand they did have ketchup for the fries, so the experience wasn’t all bad.  Also, at $7 for the whole meal Su-Z-Q’s may be the cheapest restaurant in town.

After I’d driven by, it occurred to me that Su-Z-Q’s is like a training restaurant, where teenagers go to practice eating out. They’re probably aware that there are better restaurants in Cresco, even a couple of fast-food franchises, but for right now Su-Z-Q’s won’t leave them penniless and the food is at least edible. It’s all preparation for when they go out on an actual date and go to a nice restaurant for some dinner, conversation and some awkward pre-sex talk before the sex and the unplanned pregnancy which will keep the happy couple in town for the rest of their natural lives. For now, though, it’s just practice.

My personal favorite area for low dining is the A&W restaurant, which for some reason shares space with a Long John Silver’s fast (sea)food restaurant. The arrangement is awkward, because A&W is all about the ‘50s nostalgia and the Long John Silver’s is all about the illusion that you’re dining on semi-fresh seafood. I’m not sure why these two chains have paired up, but I have seen other fast-food restaurants that host a Long John Silver’s in addition to another chain. They’re the symbiotes of the fast-food world—unable to survive by themselves unless they graft on to another more successful fast-food chain and offer enough value that the host fast-food chain doesn’t cut them loose. To be fair, they do offer decent deep-fried mushrooms. 

My reason for stopping has been and always will be A&W. I grew up with one in my hometown, and I can say that A&W introduced me to the simple pleasures of a foot long coney dog and onion rings, the joy of root beer and that cup of love known as a root beer float. It also introduced me to the concept of a black cow, a root beer float made with cola instead of root beer, which is a lot like going to see a cover band perform. I loved eating at the A&W, and I fondly remember eating there Sundays after church, with my Mom and Dad smiling as they watched my brothers and I chow down and wistfully dream about the time when they would be able to eat in a decent restaurant again.

I’ve been to eat there only twice this year, which is a good thing because the food at A&W’s is packed with extra calories. I’m not sure how, but everything A&W’s serves has more calories than normal. Just breathing the A&W air for ten minutes will cause the average restaurant patron to gain five pounds. Still, I think one of life’s pleasures should be having a coney dog and fries with a root beer float every once in awhile.

The A&W also has a classic car night once a month, usually on a Wednesday evening. I’m not sure why they chose a Wednesday evening, but let’s face it—Wednesday can use the help. Unless you live near a comic book store, there’s nothing to recommend to Wednesdays, so it’s nice to see someone doing their best to make a random day of the week special.

Of course, on classic car night you get to see how many people in the area do have classic cars. A lot of them are senior citizens, driving cars they may well have driven when they were teenagers except that these cars look as new as the day they were given. It’s great to see, especially since there aren’t many venues where you can take cars like that, outside of a classic car show, and I’m not entirely sure where the nearest one is. There’s also a DJ playing all the hits of the 50s, what writer Stephen King called teenage car songs, teenage love songs and teenage death songs. It’s a blast of nostalgia, and I have to admit I like it, although my nostalgia is a tad more recent.

Running and Unique Houses

Chris was tired to begin with. Really, really tired. The kind of tired where you’re aware you’ve overextended yourself and you can accept that, really you can, if you just manage to get a few extra hours of sleep. But where? What project will be cut? What if I zzzzzzzzzzzzzz….

That was pretty much my mindset throughout the week. Also, I couldn’t really decide on what to write. There are a couple of interesting bits I’d like write up eventually, but this time around I kind of wanted it to be topical. And how much more topical could I be than to tell you about what I did on Memorial Day?

There’s only one flaw in that strategy—I really didn’t do anything interesting Memorial Day. I had a decent weekend planned out, where Saturday would be spent leisurely taking care of some writing projects, Sunday would be the day I drive up to Rochester and practice Kendo after a week off, and Monday was…well, we’d see when we got there.

Instead, Saturday was spent trying to make sense of WordPress, then getting frustrated and doing some writing on an adventure. Sunday was unexpectedly reserved for my annual migraine, and then there was Monday. By the time Monday rolled around, I was sick of not feeling good and I wanted to do something. I could have gone up to Rochester, but I didn’t really think there was much point. I’ve been up there enough times that the thrill of being in a city has long since worn off, and while I could have gone on a spending spree, I couldn’t actually think of anything I really wanted. But I wanted to do something, something that would actually get me out and doing something. That’s the only reason I can think of why I decided to go for a run.

Running and I have a love/hate relationship. On my end, going for a run can be immensely rewarding if you take full advantage of your mind’s ability to make you forget how much pain you were in at the end of your last run. If you’re asthmatic, like me, there can also be points in your run where you realize, “hey, my lungs aren’t working! Also, I’m losing consciousness!” Of course, soreness is a part of working out and almost any asthmatic always carries an inhaler, even if they are nudists and have to be creative with where they store it (such as in the hollow of the collarbone area, the superclavicular fossa).  And so I ran.

I’m not sure how far I ran, except that when I finished my lungs felt like I had inhaled lava and I had a case of shin splints that ran from my legs to my shoulders. Still, in the grand tradition of fitness buffs and unstable mental patients everywhere I had fun.

Part of the fun is in seeing the diversity of houses, things which you don’t often see in suburbs. Sure, you may get a bit of interesting architecture, but from the 1950s on it all seems to have been crafted to fit together seamlessly with the neighboring buildings. So you can have a nice house, and houses in the suburbs often are, but a lot of them lack character. Your New York brownstone is the same as the ones on either side of you. Your home in the new suburb bears a striking resemblance to every other house in the development. Much as I love being in cities and taking advantage of all the things you can do in them, I rarely get to see interesting houses until I pass the really expensive areas. Then you see houses with personal cul-de-sacs, massive skylights, actual towers and God only knows what else.

Cresco, though, has a mishmash of interesting architecture throughout its residential sections. I ran from roughly the center of town out to a park in the northeast area of the town, and on the way I started to notice that there was the occasional house that was not like the others in some way. One of the best examples I saw was a house that looked as though it had been constructed piecemeal, with a central room and all the other rooms added as the owner got the notion. The result is a house that is brown and white, and the colors match just enough to persuade the casual passer-by not to take a closer look.  It has two perpendicular stubby wings that jut out from the central portion of the house, with a front door that opens up in the middle of a quarter-circle enclosed patio between the two wings. It is an extremely interesting house and I wonder who lives there. I wonder if they’re the original owner, if there was nothing better they could afford or if they also saw the unique character this house has? If nothing else, you could easily increase your reputation as an eccentric genius by living there. Someone who lives in that house and likes it? I suspect they think slightly differently than the rest of the Cresco inhabitants.

Another great house looks vaguely like an old Victorian mansion, only newer and painted light blue which somehow spoils the whole effect. It’s built on an angle to its lot, so that the corners of the house touch the boundaries. The front door also opens up onto the curb. It’s more common than the previous house, but I like the fact that someone decided not to build a house the usual way. Even little things like altering how the house faces can make a bold statement where a lot of buildings seem to blur together.

When I got to the northeastern Park, the houses started to become more suburbian, which was sad. However, they were also newer. See, Cresco is still far enough out in the middle of nowhere that buying some vacant property and putting up **YOUR HOME** on it is pretty tempting. Not to mention that if you cross over the town line, you don’t have to pay an extra tax for living in the town. The result is that the further away from home you get, the nicer the houses. I suspect that in a few years the trend will be for people to get their new house closer to the center of the town, creating a miniature doughnut effect that can be found in many of your more established cities.

After running along the northern road, and getting tired enough that I had to half-run half-walk the mile or so back to my apartment, I passed along more houses, including one that seemed to have aspirations of being a southern plantation, with an immense veranda. I almost wanted to walk up and order a mint julep, but instead I ran back to my apartment for some much-needed water.