Transcripts

BILL SIEMERING: Sinclair Lewis begins Main Street. "This is America, a town of a few thousand in a region of wheat and corn and dairies and little groves. The town is in our tale called Gopher Prairie, Minnesota. But its main street is a continuation of main streets everywhere. The story would be the same in Ohio or Montana, in Kansas, or Kentucky, or Illinois. And not very differently would it be told up York State or in the Carolina hills?"

I think, Connie, because of the fact that there is a universality about Main Street in many aspects that it still has currency, that it's still of interest to people in our region and really across the country. There can be provincialism in large cities as well as in small.

CONNIE: Do you think we're overly sentimental about those main streets all over Minnesota and other small towns in the Midwest?

BILL SIEMERING: There's a good deal of renewed interest, a rural renaissance, people are calling it. There is some romanticism about getting back to small town life. But the realities are such that frequently people don't have still all the cultural things that perhaps they would like. Although that's improved a good deal. I think one of the things that-- one of the things that Sinclair Lewis was striking out against, among others, was the provincialism, the narrowness, the conformity. Carol Kennicott would walk down the street and she would see the lace curtains being drawn by as she would walk by to check to see what she was doing. That lack of privacy is one of the themes that is still alive in small towns.

CONNIE: I don't think we need to be that private, that we shouldn't want other people to know what we're doing. If we're doing those kinds of things that we want to be off somewhere so that people can't tell what we're doing, well, then I think we're doing things we shouldn't be doing because we shouldn't care if anybody knows whether we're going here or going there.

BILL SIEMERING: One of the most strong devastating attacks on small town life is in Main Street, where Sinclair Lewis says, "it is an unimaginatively standardized background, a sluggishness of speech and manners, a rigid ruling of the spirit by the desire to appear respectable. It is contentment, the contentment of the quiet dead who are scornful of the living for their restless walking. It is negation, canonized as the one positive virtue. It is dullness made God." Have you ever thought about living anywhere else than in a small town?

CONNIE: I would never want to go to a big town. I like the little towns much better. I can leave my doors open here, and I can come and go as I feel. I trust people here. What does still exist in small towns that is good and is bad?

BILL SIEMERING: Well, the helpfulness is an important aspect. I think that people have that sense of community, that sense the fact that they do know about other people, they also know the history and background of people and the fact that they can say hello to everyone on the street as they walk down in the morning is a very reassuring kind of knowledge. There's not much fear.

The other thing is that people do get out. Now, the cultural aspect-- one of the other themes in Main Street was the cultural deprivation. Carol Kennicott tried to come from Saint Paul to the small town to get interest in theater and in music and architecture. And that, I think, is still a need. But because of easier transportation and the dissemination of cultural things through other media, that isolation, that cultural isolation is not as severe.

CONNIE: Bill Siemering of station KCCM in Moorhead, Minnesota, talking about small towns.