Plains Folk

NEWS for North Dakotans
Agriculture Communication, North Dakota State University
7 Morrill Hall, Fargo, ND 58105-5665

March 4, 1999

Plains Folk: Puzzling about Everyday Life

Tom Isern, Professor of History
North Dakota State University

If you're going to do puzzles, it's best to buy them in the box. Then you're guaranteed that there are a certain number of pieces in the box, that they do fit together, and that when you have fitted them, there will be a picture you can recognize. When you deal with the stuff of everyday life, there are no such guarantees.

I'm packing for the road when the telephone rings, and it's my sister-in-law, who runs the church child care in my old home town in western Kansas. The trustees say they want to eliminate funding for the operation. They want to know if any of the kids have become Lutherans because of being in the child care. She says no, but look at the people who have moved to town because it has professional child care. The trustees don't see the benefit of that, if they aren't Lutherans.

Now I'm on the road, and come to find out there's a fine cafe in the town of Drake, N.D. The town is a little awkward in its layout. If you turn north from Highway 52 you are led onto a through street a block over from Main, and so it's easy to go through and think there's no town there at all, just some houses, but there is a town, and it has the Empress Cafe. It's good enough to make me feel a little sorry for making fun of Drake a few weeks agosaying how someone is sure to launch the World's Largest Mallard pretty soon on that slough by the highway—except I don't have to feel sorry, because sure enough, someone has painted a great big greenhead on the grain elevator.

The cafe is run by two people who for no good reason, most of us would say, moved to Drake with their four kids, and they like it. Go figure. That's a piece of the puzzle, one I'm going to work on in a future column.

Another piece is 15 minutes away in the little town of Simcoe, a few miles north of Velva. Specifically, it's in the Sons of Norway hall, where Hilton Sollid, on a base of sawhorses and plywood, has built a model of the town as he recalls it from his boyhood in the 1920s. Maybe you haven't heard of Simcoe? If you want to see it, it won't do you any good to go to where the map indicates. You have to get Mr. Sollid to let you into the hall. That's where the town is. I'll show you around in another future column.

I've strayed from the path, as usual, because what I'm supposed to be doing is meeting some people in Towner to talk about a book"A Town Like Alice," a novel of the Australian outback by the English author Nevil Shute. It's a great story, if a little unlikelylucky English heroine, Ozzie ringer hero, wartime romance, postwar reunion, love overcoming obstacles.

The part I like, though, is after our heroine, Jean Paget, gets together with our hero, Joe Harmon, and sets about improving the outback cattle town of Willstown. It seems the town is being depopulated. All the young women are leaving for employment in the cities. The young men, sooner or later, follow. Jean opens a little factory so that there are jobs for the girls. Then she opens an ice cream parlor and a swimming pool. The girls marry local ringers, and their places are taken by new girls, who marry other local ringersyou get the ideaand pretty soon Willstown is on its way to becoming "a town like Alice"Alice Springs, that is, a green oasis in the Australian desert.

The people in Towner tell me there was a time, around 1960, when the town was full of kids. That was when they built the city swimming pool. Most all the kids who splashed and hollered in those days are gone. A young fellow tells me there remains a surplus of bachelors.

When I describe this to a visiting Canadian scholar and friend, she says it's biology. Men aren't so hard to satisfy; they marry readily from a limited selection of women. Women, though, refuse to pick from the small pool of men. That's why they lead the out-migration to where the menu is more extensive.

It's a puzzle. Or maybe it's a connect-the-dots.

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Source: Tom Isern (701) 231-8339

Editor: Dean Hulse (701) 231-6136