Storm Lake: A Chronicle of Change, Resilience, and Hope from a Heartland Newspaper
336
Storm Lake: A Chronicle of Change, Resilience, and Hope from a Heartland Newspaper
336Hardcover
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Overview
Iowa plays an outsize role in national politics. Iowa introduced Barack Obama and voted bigly for Donald Trump. But is it a bellwether for America, a harbinger of its future? Art Cullen’s answer is complicated and honest. In truth, Iowa is losing ground. The Trump trade wars are hammering farmers and manufacturers. Health insurance premiums and drug prices are soaring. That’s what Iowans are dealing with, and the problems they face are the problems of the heartland.
In this candid and timely book, Art Cullen—the Storm Lake Times newspaperman who won a Pulitzer Prize for taking on big corporate agri-industry and its poisoning of local rivers—describes how the heartland has changed dramatically over his career. In a story where politics, agriculture, the environment, and immigration all converge, Cullen offers an unsentimental ode to rural America and to the resilient people of a vibrant community of fifteen thousand in Northwest Iowa, as much survivors as their town.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780525558873 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Penguin Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 10/02/2018 |
| Pages: | 336 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.20(w) x 8.50(h) x 1.20(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Chapter 1
The First Question: Why?
A good reporter's first task is to ask questions. It's a family habit of ours, learned early on.
My first memory is of waving good-bye to Dad on our sun-drenched lawn one Sunday morning a hundred yards north of the sparkling lake. I was two. Dad piled into a car bound for Madison, Wisconsin, where he would be a guinea pig for a potential cure for tuberculosis. The year was 1959.
Why did he leave me there? Where was he going? Would he come back?
A childhood friend of his from Whittemore, Iowa, Lloyd Roth, head of the department of pharmacology at the University of Chicago, was working on this project at the Veterans Administration hospital. Roth was also a physicist and had worked on the Manhattan Project, which developed the atomic bomb.
Dad had picked up TB during World War II while stationed in Sicily with the Army Air Corps. He was a captain in charge of a supply depot at an air base; it's a wonder the planes could fly because he didn't know a screw from a screwdriver. The disease didn't fully manifest itself until after the war. When it did, more than a decade later, our family was in quarantine in Storm Lake, Iowa, a meatpacking town of about seven thousand with a small college and, yes, a lake.
There we were, Mom alone with six kids, I the youngest.
Brother Bill let loose hamsters in the basement that spread throughout the house.
Brother Jim and I painted the basement red—including the clothes and bedding drying in the furnace room.
Brother Tom, the eldest, tore the screen doors off the Corral Drive-In theater with a beery buddy.
Brother John wanted to run away.
Sister Ann was taking care of me, after a fashion.
Mom called Dad in the hospital hoping for sympathy. He laughed.
They took out a lung and he wasn't supposed to last more than a few months. He made it fourteen years, just long enough for me not to understand him.
Meantime, Mom had been battling the VA ever since the war ended, trying to get him promised benefits. The records building in St. Louis burned down and with it the evidence that Dad contracted TB while in service.
She had been through an endless siege for information before. Her first husband and father of my oldest brother, Tom, Omer Kelly, was shot to death in a Chicago bar when Tom was about two. Mom spent years trying to find out how he died. Her father, Art Murray, traveled from Bancroft, Iowa, to Chicago with his lawyer, Luke Linnan, to find justice. Linnan had an old friend who was a judge there. The judge told them to go home, and to quit asking questions.
She never quit asking.
Our mother reared us to do the same.
Sometimes your questions get answered. Which means, of course, that often they don't. I have been a reporter and editor for Iowa newspapers for thirty-eight years, and I've spent a lot of that time asking questions about little towns and about quiet people who also ask the same questions amid a patchwork of corn and soybean rows.
I didn't mean to wind up in Storm Lake at all. I was driving to the big city and bright lights but took a U-turn to come back home where brother John had just started a weekly newspaper, The Storm Lake Times. I did not want to go back. But the journey led me to the story of a lifetime, to a Pulitzer Prize in 2017 for taking on corporate agriculture over river pollution, and down a road to a place where I finally realized that I belonged.
Worlds are built and worlds are buried amid the tall grass here in Iowa. You plunge your finger in the soft black soil and expose a seed, a kernel of knowing where you are, a story, an idea, a myth of who you are, and it grows out here against all the odds. It persists against the hail that comes sideways. It preserves itself frozen in a January gale out of the northwest that makes you wonder how you ever survived. It gets flooded and scorched and comes back. No matter what you do for the next ten years, it comes back. It demands you pay heed to it, heel to it, nurture it, and hope for it. It's the land, the story, an impulse to take a rough first draft of history, a drive to divine some truth in a place that lays it bare, by asking and listening. To love a place and be its chronicler, to commit yourself to it, to prick its conscience and make it aware that we have bucked up against its limits, and to leave your mark for posterity. The seed becomes a song, its verses written in this expansive green garden, and you are left to discern them and write one anew. To be a friend to the place and not to spoil it.
These are the questions I start with.
Who came first, and where did they go?
What is our place?
When will I live up to him?
How do we live against that horizon?
Why am I drawn or pushed here?
Where are we going?
Into the pink sunset, down Buena Vista County blacktop C-49, as the combines spew dust and corn stover, you can almost see the lights eleven miles west as dusk enshrouds Varina, home to St. Columbkille Catholic Church and a grain elevator outpost with a smattering of weathered frame houses.
Home beckons.
Storm Lake, Iowa.
Chapter 2
The Next Question: Why Not?
The phone rang where I sat for another hot and dank August evening in 1990 at the Mason City, Iowa, Globe Gazette. I was the night editor. The job and life were everything the glamorous title suggests. I was the one responsible for getting the paper put to bed before a 1:00 a.m. press time.
I had just finished my supper of a cold sandwich; I was sitting in the break room in the basement, where you could hear an ancient press hulking on the other side of that gray steel door.
It was John on the other end of the line. Again. He said it was too much, this new little tabloid weekly. He needed me.
John had been publicly relating for Buena Vista University, a Presbyterian college of about one thousand students on the lakeshore campus in Storm Lake. But he, too, had been a newspaperman, though he'd been out of it for six years, and he missed his editorial soapbox. He walked into his old office at the Storm Lake Pilot Tribune in 1989 and asked if he could buy it. The publisher, a pup in his twenties and son of the chain owner, told John, a seventeen-year veteran of community journalism, that he didn't quite understand business.
That got his Irish up. There was no happy handshake. The moment he walked out the door he knew he was launching his own paper.
With daughter Bridget, a toddler, and son Justin, an infant, John told his wife, Mary, that he wanted to start a weekly. The Storm Lake Times, "Buena Vista County's Hometown Newspaper." She must have told him he was nuts.
I for certain told him he was nuts.
I was a reporter and editorial writer miscast to run a news desk and copyediting operation for the Globe Gazette, a twenty-seven-thousand-circulation, seven-day regional paper "Making All North Iowans Neighbors." I hated it.
Copy editors can save your career and maybe your life. They can make you sound like Yeats. And they can take the fun out of the Cubs winning the World Series because they get no credit for it. And you do not know grammar.
But when John called me, not long after his meeting with the pup, and asked me to come home to help start a weekly, I told him he was out of his mind. The Pilot Tribune was the oldest business in Storm Lake, older than prostitution. Take your TIAA-CREF college pension and hide amid the ivy vines, I advised.
He didn't listen. John is stubborn.
Eighteen months before, I had moved up I-35 from the Daily Tribune of Ames (home of the Iowa State University Cyclones) to Mason City (home of the former brick factory) on my way to Minneapolis. I was determined to get back to the Minneapolis Tribune, where I got my start. I was making steady progress up my path, even if I was at the point of a nervous breakdown. If I could just hang in there at Mason City another year or so, maybe a Twin Cities door would crack open. Maybe I could get back to reporting. Maybe I could get at that big story.
We had two children. Son Joe was two and daughter Clare was a newborn. I worked nights while they slept. I slept during the day when they played with Dolores.
I was having my midlife crisis about eighteen years early, at thirty-two. I resisted the urge to buy a red Corvette soft top for lack of funds. We had a red Plymouth K-Car station wagon that rattled tie rods over railroad tracks. My fantastic notions of being a national correspondent for a great American newspaper were being revealed as just that. I was a hack night editor wearing a bow tie to work that even the gay copy editor sneered at, not to mention the sports slot man from northern Minnesota who made racist comments out loud. You couldn't fire him because he whipped out the sports agate pages with the standings and late scores so fast.
I quit going to church. I even started reading the Bible looking for some truth. That was a first. Armageddon scared me off (I always begin at the end to see how everything turns out). I wasn't writing anything worthwhile. People at work didn't especially like me. The editor who hired me left for another paper in the chain two weeks after I was seated. The future didn't exactly beckon. I didn't believe in much of anything anymore. I wanted to do a special reporting project assisted by Iowa State University on post-Soviet agricultural reconstruction in Russia. The grant fell through. I begged for a job at the Des Moines Register as an ag or business writer. No luck. But I still thought I could make it up to Minneapolis.
The human resources department at chain headquarters in Davenport ran the Mason City paper, in perpetual fear of a union. Strangely, it ended up that they could not fire anybody because of the threat of a union that did not exist, and they didn't want anyone to start one. It was impossible to get a fire going on a mossback. Sometimes they referred to our paper in the corporate newsletters as a "profit center," not a newspaper for a community of people who wanted to be neighbors.
What was I doing there?
And John was on the phone.
The Storm Lake Times, his new baby, had a big appetite. Way bigger than he expected. People in town were aching for a home-owned, hometown paper by a homegrown boy. It hit four thousand paid circulation in no time in a town that had grown to nearly ten thousand people.
"I need your help," he said. When big brother asks baby brother for help a second time, it's a charm.
Why not?
I told Dolores that we should move home to Storm Lake and forget about my corporate climb. She thought I was crazy, just like my brother.
"Sounds pretty risky," said her farmer father in a pair of fifteen-year-old bib overalls.
I wrote my first "Editor's Notebook" column for The Storm Lake Times on September 28, 1990.
"I'm out to prove Tom Wolfe wrong. He said you can't go home again. I'm home after 15 years and it feels good."
That was the lede.
"I left with a laundry bag over my shoulder in 1975 bound for St. Paul and swearing never to look back. Funny how the years, a few gray hairs and a couple of little children clear one's vision."
I talked about how John got me my first job in Algona, Iowa, and how I came home with a new identity. I explained that I grew up in Storm Lake being called Jerry but switched my byline to Art because I never liked Jerry. Jerry Lewis: goofy. Art Buchwald: goofy but clever.
"A tornado destroyed much of Algona. Then a flood. My brother John left me as editor, and a farm depression brought Kossuth County to its knees. Fifteen percent of the county's population was ushered out over the past decade, including me. Often I miss it, and often I worry about that old home.
"In Ames, where I edited The Daily Tribune, one could see a state determined to rebuild itself. A great story was building around research parks, business incubators, new agricultural product development centers, biotechnology complexes and an Extension Service that was writing a gospel on diversification just as fervent as the message of planting maize on ISU's 'Corn Train' 100 years ago. . . .
"Such musings came back to me as I drove down the Varina blacktop on Sunday evening. I thought of where I had been and where I was going the next day.
"I thought of the Indian trails along Storm Lake and Buena Vista College, the dam at pretty little Linn Grove and the Saturday livestock auction at the sale barn, Sunday band concerts and meatpacking.
"Not a whole lot had changed, but my Storm Lake vanished with me 15 years ago. It still is a progressive town with wide streets and a cold winter wind. It still depends too much on pork slaughter and the college, and it still seems somewhat content as things are.
"This has changed: I look at Storm Lake and Buena Vista County through an adult's eyes today. I see an opportunity to help build a community around all those old, abiding graces that once sent me out with a sense of wonder. That's what The Storm Lake Times is all about-building a community, building a newspaper and building a business.
"What a priceless opportunity, what a comforting town. It's great to be home."
We bought a home on Irving Street, just a block west of John and Mary's house on Cayuga Street (named after a New York Finger Lake, along with Seneca and Oneida streets). Old maple trees were in full fall blaze when we moved in. St. Mary's School, where the Cullens learned to write, was just three blocks away.
John grows a mustache, I grow a mustache. John goes to work at a newspaper, I go to work at a newspaper. John gets married, I get married a year later. He buys a house near Lover's Lane along the lake, I buy a house near Lover's Lane along the lake.
The Cullen Brothers opened a new chapter in the history of Storm Lake. Print the truth and raise hell.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Storm Lake"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Art Cullen.
Excerpted by permission of Penguin Publishing Group.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Author's Note ix
Chapter 1 The First Question: Why? 1
Chapter 2 The Next Question: Why Not? 5
Chapter 3 "And Ye Shall Have Dominion over the Land" 11
Chapter 4 Bringing Home the Bacon 21
Chapter 5 Lessons for Life 40
Chapter 6 A Tornado and an Implosion 52
Chapter 7 Lust at First Sight 64
Chapter 8 The Newspaper Is the Family 75
Chapter 9 State Slogan: A Place to Grow 89
Chapter 10 A Purple Hybrid 101
Chapter 11 The Young Men from Jalisco 145
Chapter 12 Saving a Prairie Pothole 169
Chapter 13 A Challenge to Industrial Agriculture 178
Chapter 14 We Can't Go On Like This 199
Chapter 15 Via Dolorosa 231
Chapter 16 A Place to Call Home 245
Chapter 17 "We Won!" 270
Chapter 18 We Wish to Remain What We Are 292
Chapter 19 Where Is That Song Coming From? 310