During one of my college summers I helped the publisher of a weekly newspaper in the next county publish a centennial issue. It involved a month of interviewing people and writing biographical sketches so that they would be included in the 120-page special supplement. In cleaning up my den, I found my copy and sat down to read it.
I was reminded of the mundane tone of the sketches of people who grew up on a farm and stayed there the rest of their life—or their brothers who got out of high school, got a job as a mechanic and stayed—or delivered the same mail route for 47 years. One of my pieces was about Bill Bailor. Bill grew up in that town, inherited a variety store from his father, and was still running it 40 years later.
Bill’s distinction, if that is the word, was that he had never gone out of the county—not even 15 miles to the nearest movie theater. He had a television set and that told him as much about the rest of the world as he wanted to know. The salesmen for his products came to him for orders. The town of 1200 people had the county high school, several churches, two auto dealers, two clothing stores, a library, doctors, and a small hospital. He watched the passenger trains roaring through that town, hauling people from Chicago to New Orleans or back. He saw an occasional airplane flying overhead.
As I read the article, I remembered asking him if his insularity was deliberate. His answer was that his father had told him that travel was expensive and wasteful and even dangerous and there was no need for him to do it. So, in 60 years, he had not gone anywhere farther than the north end of the county, where he met and wooed his wife. By the time I talked with him, he was proud of his record and determined to keep it going the rest of his life.
A generation or so earlier, Bill would have had a lot of company. Farm families lived at the end of muddy roads. A trip to the county seat was an all-day journey in the family wagon pulled by the same mule that pulled the plow. The county seat was where they went to get seed to be planted and where they brought their crops to be sold. Some of them shopped in Bill’s store and listened to his more sophisticated conversation about city life.
By contrast, Bill’s nephew enlisted in the army air corps a decade earlier. He had flown all over the world during World War II as a crew member on a B17 bomber. After the war, he stayed in the military and was living in Japan when I did the interview. The nephew’s wife was a German woman he met after the war ended. Bill was always glad to see the nephew and his wife when they visited and he enjoyed their stories. But theirs was a different world, and it never occurred to Bill that he might be part of it.
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