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VICKIE STURGEON: The following edition of The Poet's Perspective is presented as it was broadcast over KRSW's regional magazine, Home for the Weekend. The Poet's Perspective was funded in part by the Minnesota Humanities Commission.

JOE PADDOCK: "Raymond [? Pradel, ?] Clarence [? Morse, ?] and some others, we were talking about our memories. And the most important part of our lives, the things we know best, are right back in school. Memories are so vivid. And then you go on and get away up in years. And things get so cluttered by the time you're 67 years old, you haven't got room for all that stuff.

When you live in a small town, you have a standard by which you live. You know everybody, and that they are the most important people in the world. Even though you have moved away, you still judge everything else by your hometown. And I think that a person that lives in a city misses that very much. Here, you see people live and die, and your memories are with them."

[SINGING "HOME IS WHERE THERE IS ONE TO LOVE US"]

Not merely four square walls

Though with pictures hung and gilded

Home is where affection calls

Filled with shrines the hearth was builded

Home! Go watch the faithful dove

Sailing 'neath the heavens above us

Home is where there's one to love

Home is where there's one to love us.

KIM HODGSON: You heard Joe Paddock reading the words of Harris Nelson, a native of Olivia, Minnesota, who has achieved a degree of fame as an entertainer, but who always comes back to the small community he considers home. Good morning, and welcome to Home for the Weekend, made possible this week in part with funds provided by the State Bank of Redwood Falls and the Otto Bremer Foundation of Saint Paul. I'm Kim Hodgson. Vickie Sturgeon is still on vacation, and John [? Morrill ?] is once again on the technical end of things.

Our program this morning is about small communities and some of the things which have made them so attractive to the people who live there. Some of those things are gone now, and new things have come, which have proved disruptive. We'll hear about some of these as well. We'll consider small communities from the viewpoints of some who have studied them, and from the viewpoints of some who have lived there, as well as from the poet's perspective of Joe and Nancy Paddock, which begins our program.

(SINGING) To greet us

Home is where there's one to love us

Home is where

Home is where

There's no place like home

There's no place like home

Home is where

NANCY PADDOCK: Here's Harry Madsen talking about when he was postmaster in Olivia. "During my tenure as postmaster, we moved from the old office down there, where [? Wieneke ?] and Gilchrist's office is now, the old Lauerman building. We built the first building. That's about 16 years ago. So we had all that to go through, moving in.

And a little before that, we went into the city delivery. That was a big deal too. Town people all had to come to the post office for their mail. We had 550-some boxes where people had to come and get their own mail. I was right in the heart of town for activity then. I knew everybody, and now I don't know anybody."

I guess now that there's the home delivery, there's something lost there. I know when Billy Moran used to work in the post office, he talked all the different languages that people had in town. Some people spoke Bohemian, some German, some Swedish, different languages. And he learned a little bit of each one working there and, again, being in the heart of things. And there's something lost then for those people when that goes away.

JOE PADDOCK: I interviewed the daughter of Chris Jensen, who ran Jensen's Pool Hall in Olivia. She said, "there was a certain bunch that were there when you opened up. And when you closed, they were still there, playing cards. It was a great place for the older people to play cards, Pinochle and rummy. A lot of Pinochle."

"No, no, I never played along. I wasn't that good at it. I was just a little girl. But then he had four or five pool tables and, you know, the spittoon sitting around on the floor.

And dad enjoyed the banter in the pool hall. He enjoyed every minute of it. And he'd like to play a little cards. And he was the one who fixed the meat. Nobody but him. They always used to say that the reason they were so good is hamburgers and steaks. He'd have these big cast iron frying pans, and the grease was in there from one day to another." Laughs.

"And the people came for miles for them. And they were good. I don't know how he did it. I guess it was the cast iron pans. I'm sure he washed them once in a while, but they always say the flavor is-- yeah." And then she just ends her little statement about this, saying, "later, after that pool hall was gone, a lot of older people, they were just lost."

NANCY PADDOCK: Another thing about a community is that everybody knows everybody. And there's a sort of personal way that people deal with each other. There's a way that things are handled between people that know each other that's different. There isn't the same kind of red tape that's necessary. And it's the same way with the way the law works. And we have a story from the oral history, and it's about the way they handled juvenile delinquency back in those days.

This is Harold Dirks talking. "I suppose we did get into trouble once in a while, but it wasn't too tragic. Most of the time, the people around then said, well, boys will be boys, you know? And someone would come and get you by the back of the neck and drag you into a corner and say, now, look, you were in on that deal, weren't you? And you'd say, yes, I was.

Well, you know, it wasn't the best thing to do. Well, yes, I know, but it was a lot of fun. Well, I guess you won't do it again. And that would be the end of it."

Nowadays, it has to go through juvenile court, and you have to get a probation officer. And I'm sure that--

JOE PADDOCK: A lot of people need those delinquents out there to keep their way of earning a living intact.

NANCY PADDOCK: [CHUCKLES] One of the things that seems to be-- I don't know how much a thing of the past, but something that communities always did for their members was that they'd help each other. In the old days, the threshing crews would come through. And all the neighbors would get together and do somebody's work and then move on to the next.

Here's Martha van [? Deursen ?] talking about that. "When Leo had threshing crews, we had as many as 15 to 20 men to cook for. And maybe your neighbor lady would come and help you with part of that. And the neighbors helped each other with the threshing, the men.

I can remember back when we stacked our grain and had the steam engine yet to come and thresh it in the fall, say even as late as October. We thresh these stacks of grain. Then the threshers got these crews together, and they would thrash it out of the shocks. That is when your neighbors helped each other. They had furnished a bundle, or a wagon, or a grain wagon. And when we had the steam engines yet, why, they had to have a water man, a water wagon."

And then she keeps going back to that when she's talking about neighbors helping each other and how you just don't have that anymore, that sometimes you don't know your neighbors. And maybe you travel 50 miles to visit your friends, but neighbors don't even get together anymore. And she feels a sense of loss for that.

[PIANO MUSIC]

This is Fred Black. "There used to be the house parties. And everybody would get together, and they'd have a good time. A square dance would be 8 couples, 15, 18 people. We had a pretty good-sized house for that time, a living room, 14 by 16-- oh, that was a good place to dance-- an accordion and sometimes a violin and banjo. Everybody brought a cake and sandwiches or something.

It's too bad we can't do that once in a while now. It is, by golly, yes. You knew everybody there, and you danced with everybody, and lots of other reasons to get together back then, working and such. Only thing, at that time, you knew your neighbors around you. And outside of that, you didn't know many people.

JOE PADDOCK: I think if you do as few as a half a dozen interviews with old-time people from this particular region, farmers, especially, almost everybody had some sort of ties with the farms in those days anyway. You'll immediately be aware of how important these house parties, and dances, and barn dances, but especially the house parties, were to the lives of people in those days. That was a continuing thing.

And all of them will tell you about it, and they all miss it. And the community would get together in this particular ritual, and it would be their neighborhood community probably and people say at a maximum of 10 miles away.

And they would-- anybody could come really. They were sort of open house as a rule. And they would come, and they would all bring a little potluck. And they would dance, and there would be whatever music was available.

And in those days, if it happened to be dark out, these things would go all night long because they didn't have lights on their horses and buggies. And they didn't have flashlights when they walked. So it happened to be a dark night, not a moonlit night. Well, then, they'd have to stay there until the sun came up. I got that story again and again. And it's completely gone now, and they really regret it.

And you'll even get a little comments, like when Bill Moran, who was a square dance caller, about the middle of the '50s, he said that people started spending their time drinking with their own clique. And you didn't mix them up with the square dancing as much anymore. They weren't interested in it. The square dance, you had to mix up. You had to dance with everybody. You would change partners all the time. And so there was a sort of mix of contact, actual physical contact with everybody in your community.

[PIANO MUSIC]

Another typical get together that has died away now, difference between the old-time communities and the contemporary ones, is the shivaree. And Harold Dirks told me a little bit about what they were like. Says, "that was fun to have a great day to get married. And then at night, we'd get out there with tin cans and what have you, and whoop-de-up, whoop-de-up, and pounding.

I remember some of the old timers used to take a big old circle saw along. If you had that and something to hit that with, it really made quite a noise. And then they'd get it out there and shivaree those people. And it was just too bad if they didn't come along with some nickels. Catch him after the wedding or after when the feeding was going on, that night usually.

A wedding wasn't as big a deal as it is now. Had something to eat, and then probably got married in the afternoon, and probably had a feed that night, and that's about the time to sneak in. Or if they did go on a honeymoon, try to catch them on the first day back. Sometimes, we used to catch the bride beforehand and ride around town with her in a cage or something." Can you imagine? [CHUCKLES]

[PIANO MUSIC]

KIM HODGSON: The post office, the pool hall, the barn raising, even the shivaree, these were institutions which helped hold small communities together. Time passed. Progress brought new institutions, big industrial installations, for example, which sometimes challenged existing structures.

On the other hand, new businesses and industries may, themselves, be affected by the rural communities in which they settle. Gene Ramsey, now at the University of Texas in Arlington, is a former professor of rural sociology at the University of Minnesota. Vickie Sturgeon spoke with him last spring about what motivates an industry to act in the best interests of the community. For example, why does a plant clean up its industrial waste?

GENE RAMSEY: What we find is, in the industries that are located in urban areas, it's the enforcement and pressure from very specialized agencies that are concerned only with enforcing the law regarding the emission of wastes. In the rural area, however-- now, remember, so these industries are owned by the public. They're absentee owners. The big thing is not that.

In fact, that enforcement doesn't make any difference in whether the industry cleans up its wastes. The big factor there is how much identification, and communication, and contact they have in the community generally. In other words, are they real members of that community? And if they are, they clean up their wastes. If they are not, they don't. And that correlation is very high, much higher than we usually get in sociology.

KIM HODGSON: While it's reassuring to know that a small town may humanize the local branch of a large corporation, Dr. Ramsey believes that much conflict that arises within small towns is due to the influx of outsiders that such an industry may bring with it.

GENE RAMSEY: I did a study of 51 communities across the northern tier of states. And most of the rural communities were what I call inert. In other words, not much happening. Or they were dominated by just a very few people in a very tight structure.

What happened, we had another type of community we classified as factional, which has a lot of rancorous conflict. People hate each other, and this kind of thing. And we expected other grounds than this in-migration of professionals and managerial people to produce this kind of conflict.

But the most frequent kind of conflict we found was the new in-migrant against the older traditional ways. Of course, they have different ways of doing things. I don't know whether they're better or worse, but the point is they're different.

And of course, they have an effective power base to implement those new ways. So you find, for example, more money going into schools because these managers want a good school for their kids and more maybe going into streets. You have a lot of necessities of new streets to get to the plant, things of this sort. So that's a very important consideration.

I think another thing is the little nitty gritty of daily life. People say, oh, plants coming in, and I'm going to get a job. Well, that depends on the policy of the plant. For example, in Worthington, a plant came in which had a policy that anyone who wanted to stay with the company when a plant closed could do so if they were willing to move. And of course, some of them were willing to move, and they moved into Worthington, and it caused some problems. [CHUCKLES]

KIM HODGSON: Ho, ho, ho, indeed. One criticism often lodged against the small town is that it is too tightly knit, too parochial, and too suspicious of outsiders, the residents of small towns being afraid that newcomers are going to change or even take over their towns. Vickie raised that issue with Dr. Ramsey and also with Dr. Roy Rickson, a fellow rural sociologist.

GENE RAMSEY: The problem here is knowing what sector of the rural community you're talking about. The man on the street-- I'm not talking about the guy who runs the dime store, but the clerk-- will not be greatly affected except the supermarket lines will be longer. That kind of nitty gritty.

As a matter of fact, their schools, the institutions they deal with, may be improved. The person who will be most affected is the person, say, in the upper middle class who are, themselves, managers, and professionals, and so on. And they will be greatly affected in a competitive manner because these outsiders, some of them are highly competent. They're very aggressive, some of them. But the main thing is, they're different.

ROY RICKSON: There are some effects that-- empirical generalizations or findings from a number of studies on the movement of industry to small towns, big industry to small towns, that I think can add to that-- answer to that question a little bit.

Nonmetropolitan industrial workers, that is, those people that are living in small towns, working in industry as a group, are more mobile than rural dwellers generally. In other words, these people are likely to travel more. These people are also, in many cases, more socially mobile in the sense of movement from lower class to middle class.

Nonmetropolitan industrial workers have larger households, more children, larger incomes. And especially when one is talking about a managerial class moving in, this can upset considerably the local prestige system as to who is who in the community. And of course, this is not all bad, but change in this respect can be painful to the individuals that are involved.

Probably as important, new jobs often do not go to the local unemployed, underemployed, minorities, or marginally employable persons likely to be near or below the poverty level. The new jobs that are created, in many cases, are likely to be those requiring some skill, and not those in which can readily pick up those who are not skilled because of low education and not having any training that will allow them to move into these kind of industries.

So although industry coming in does so for the purposes of having a dependable workforce, in many cases, the industry coming in has to recruit highly skilled people to come in and take jobs that are offered in the local community. So it doesn't always hold that jobs are increased dramatically for the local community, nor does it hold that people who formerly could not get jobs will be able to get jobs because of the industry moving in.

GENE RAMSEY: However, I do want to mention, again, that it doesn't appear to change the general friendly atmosphere of the small community. This is something that is often overlooked by urban-grown sociologists and economists and so on.

But the idea that there is this informal, friendly thing going on there that you-- if you walk down the street and you pass 500 people in one block, you can't stop and speak to each person. So the city begins to look unfriendly and very impersonal. Of course, what people do in the city is they have their friends on basis other than neighborhood. They have it on a basis of occupation.

But a review of several studies-- I think it was over 300 fellow down at Wisconsin-- said that the general pattern was that the introduction or invasion of industry into the rural community did not change that little friendly families type of thing that people love so much in the rural area and miss when they move to the city. I have missed it.

On the other hand, if the population change results from moving industry, and, in other words, if there is a dramatic increase in the population, then you get the urban type of atmosphere, which is impersonal, simply because you just meet too many people.

KIM HODGSON: Gene Ramsey, who now teaches at the University of Texas in Arlington, and Roy Rickson, now teaching in Australia. Both are former professors of rural sociology at the University of Minnesota.

[CHORAL MUSIC]

[INAUDIBLE]

JOE PADDOCK: Danube was German. Becken was Bohemian. Svea was Scandinavian. And there was some Irish in here, sure, Birch Coulee. And there was a mixture of people. And now we talk about some of the Irish jokes and some of the Polish jokes they tell, and some people get mad at those things. But years ago, we had those, and they'd laugh about it.

Years ago, a farmer would build a new barn and put on a barn dance to help pay for it. Maybe the Bohemians would put up a good old shindig. And the Irish would sneak over there to bust it up. You end up in a pretty good scrap. Next day, they'd be over there to patch it up or something for one another.

Oh, there was a little exclusiveness in it. Thought they were better than the other one. You'd better marry a good old German girl, or, you'd better marry a Swede, or so on. But then when the boys and girls got to wandering around, you couldn't stop it. Well, they're mixed up pretty good now.

[CHORAL MUSIC]

[INAUDIBLE]

KIM HODGSON: The words of Olivia resident, Harold Dirks, recalling that since the earliest days, some of our small communities have found reasons for exclusivity and parochialism.

NANCY PADDOCK: Howard Moore, who teaches at Southwest State, has kind of caught a lot of the feeling, I think, in the-- well, in his "Lucas Township" poem.

In Lucas township, after the blizzard, a frozen dog cantilevered into space near our border.

This was clearly not one of ours.

All our dogs know better.

Driving County 22, the air changes at the invisible line between Lucas and the other places.

People pronounce "hello" with strange accents.

The finger wave from the steering wheel lacks sincerity.

Those people want our land, our wives.

They want to make us like them.

In Lucas, we mainly drive Chevys.

And those who don't, have good reasons.

We believe in God and have our own interpretation of the bible.

We are forming a university for our children,

But don't think we want you here.

We can recognize a stranger long before he crosses the border,

Practicing yesterday's password.

[PIANO MUSIC]

PAM LANDERS: There was an influx of about-- oh, in 1970 and '71, there was a big influx of managers' wives and professionals' wives into town. And I use the words "wives" because that's primarily the role here, you know? 90% anyway. And they had a lot to do with bringing in the seeds.

KIM HODGSON: The seeds Pam Landers spoke of were those of the women's movement in Olivia, Minnesota. Landers, in writing her dissertation for an anthropology PhD from the University of Minnesota, is studying the activities of a group of women who all happened to move to Olivia several years ago.

Landers feels that a lot of the changes and progress taking place in Olivia are a result of the activities of some 30 women, most of them who came to town because their husbands jobs relocated them there. These women helped organize action groups, which concentrated on various community problems. They soon found that they were outsiders, and not so much to Olivia, but to the male-dominated political and economic base of the town. One of the most visible signs of their involvement may be the election last year of Mary Page, who is Olivia's first woman mayor.

MARY PAGE: The thing that I think prepared me most for the council, for that job that I felt was the most valid of all experiences, was that I spent two and a half years watching the council operate. I went to the meetings. I took notes. I attempt to analyze and evaluate how this was being done. And that was something that I built on for the campaign.

Another one of the things that I didn't stress a lot during the campaign, but that was a real part of this, was that a number of years previously-- I have to jump back a little bit further-- I went to a meeting that was-- it has to do with the University of Minnesota and the extension division, OK? They had a thing called Focus on the Future for Women quite a few years ago. And I got in on the ones that were held the second year.

And I went to it, and a really fired up kind of thing about-- I can remember a few things that said, you have to understand how decisions are made in your community if you're going to influence them. You have to understand the power structure, and you have to understand that just because an idea is good or right does not mean it's going to be carried through. I mean, you've got to understand how this operates.

So then I was able to get a group here in Olivia, I would think, maybe, eight women. And we met once a week and talked for maybe two, three hours about the power structure. And we went home and did some homework on it. But we spent probably six months doing this every week. It was an exciting time because we could see patterns. We could see things that were happening that we'd never thought of even looking for it before.

KIM HODGSON: Even though she's on the inside of the political structure, Page maintains that the true power within the community does not reside with the elected officials.

MARY PAGE: The mayor and the council are not power positions. We are followers. The ideas are generated elsewhere and come to us. Now, occasionally, we are among a group that generates ideas, but it is not-- most of those ideas are not generated within the council chambers. You would find an awful lot of argument with that, but I honestly believe that is so.

PAM LANDERS: Where do they come from?

MARY PAGE: They come from people who have probably done their-- they had their civic roles. So they have some background. They understand how things fit in. But now, they're not bogged down with that.

They are people who have access to money, control it in some way. Maybe there are a lot of employees that are under them. There are a number of ways in which this can be done, but there's still an economic factor to it. And it has to do with people who feel that they like their town and they want things to go in it.

And at the time that we were studying the power structure, there was a little cafe called The Peppermint Stick. And there was a table there that the men sat around. It was bigger than the rest of them. And it was a come and go kind of thing.

But there were many times the same people who came and sat down and had morning coffee together, or early morning breakfast, or something. And that still occurs. And it gathers together certain people. And a lot of times, the ideas are generated here. And one of the reasons it's generated there is because they meet every day, five days a week. And the carryover and the amount of information that is available to that same group of people, has something to do with it.

PAM LANDERS: Have you tried to crash the table there?

MARY PAGE: I knew without ever being told, even before I started studying the power structure, that no woman sat at that table. There was like an invisible shield. If you were sensitive at all to it, you knew that you did not go over and just sit down at that table. And there are tables similar to it now in restaurants by different names. And that isn't all bad that that's where it's coming from, but I do have the knowledge that that is where it comes from.

KIM HODGSON: That ritual of morning coffee and its counterpart in other communities may be more important to the cohesiveness and health of the small town than we realize. Pam Landers believes those men gathering around that old table in your local cafe are like a group of corporate executives sitting around a long, shiny table in some urban office building.

PAM LANDERS: Those guys were the people with money and property. And when they sat down at that table, what you had represented there were most of the boards in town of one kind or another-- the city council, the church boards, the Lions club, the C & C. There were representatives of every one of those around that table. And some of them, more than others, were the initiators and the lead, the pacemakers. Others of them were primarily message carriers, back to those boards.

But it was like a series of overlapping directorships and a very effective communication system, and it's because everybody who was sitting around that table knew how everybody else felt by the time they got done with their morning coffee or your everyday coffee. People that meet together every day strengthen their abilities to get things done because they just have that much closer contact with what's going on in everybody else's head.

KIM HODGSON: That was Pam Landers and, before her, mayor Mary Page of Olivia.

[PIANO MUSIC]

We've been talking about some of the conflicts that occur when a group of outsiders settle in a small town. Well, there are some outsiders in our region who go into a community not to cause problems, but to help solve them. They're called enablers, and they work for CENCOAD, the Center for Community Organization and Area Development.

CENCOAD was established in 1969 by Augustana College and provide services to communities upon their request. In Sioux Falls, Vickie spoke with the director of CENCOAD, Vic Pavlenko, about the problems which enablers may face in dealing with the existing power structure. To Pavlenko, the important thing is to identify the people who have power, the people who can get things done.

VIC PAVLENKO: A major constraint we run up against is it's more of an image kind of thing. And it is-- I don't know. Your sociologists or political theorists maybe disagree. And I'm not an expert, so I don't know.

But my sense is that power is not fixed in terms of quantity. And that the common image that people oftentimes have is that there's only so much power to go around. And there are some people in our community who've got it. And maybe I don't have it, and so I'm not going to get it. I just don't think power is fixed.

And I don't think we're talking about dividing up a pie. I think it's really a fluid kind of thing, and it's dependent on the resources that we, ourselves, have at our command, and how and when we choose to utilize those resources to get on with whatever it is we're trying to get on with.

And one of the premises for us is that the more people you get involved in trying to solve a community problem or implement a community program, the more power really the community has because you've got broader knowledge. You have more ideas that get put in the hopper. Plus, you begin to get a consensus of the people that we want to move in that direction.

And because people had a chance to understand that they do know some things about their town, that they do count as individuals, that whole knowledge of self is their power, and nobody else has that power. So they can exercise that and pull it together in different kinds of organizational arrangements around different kinds of concerns at any point in time.

And power is just, for me, at least, not fixed in a community. And there are no givens, I guess, for me, when we come into a community. There are some-- you gotta keep moving through the constraints and figuring out which are real and which aren't. And when it is, people want to commit the resources they have, which is the basis of the power they're going to exercise.

KIM HODGSON: When it comes down to wielding power and solving management problems, Pavlenko believes the people who run small towns are actually more efficient than their urban counterparts.

VIC PAVLENKO: I'm intrigued, and that's primarily because I was not born and raised in a rural area, but was born and raised in urban areas. And I've spent the last over 11 or 12 years of my life in rural areas. And I'm intrigued by what seems to me to be parallel operations between large metropolitan centers and small rural communities, that it takes-- if you take a big city like Chicago or New York, probably 35 to 50 people are running those major urban centers.

Virtually the same number of people are running small communities and are dealing with basically the same organizations and institutional structures as you find in a large urban government-- urban center. You have a school system that people have to run. You have elected and appointed political positions and boards, commissions, committees.

You have the whole voluntary sector of a community with churches and service organizations so that you can virtually lay a picture of the basic structures that make life possible in Chicago on a small community in our area. And they're the same. And I think virtually the same numbers of people are running them.

And what happens to us here, I think, are two things. One, we've got fewer people to run essentially the same number and kinds of organizations. And so you end up meeting yourself-- coming and going from meetings. And people are attending at least one every night or three every night, four to five nights a week.

And the second thing that intrigues me is, I think the margins in decision-making that we deal with in small communities is less. And therefore, the demands for the quality of our decision-making greater in small communities than in large urban centers, so that a place like Chicago can afford to make a judgment error that costs the city $5 to $10 million or something, and they don't even flinch. Life goes on.

If-- and I'm thinking of the little town of Canton, South Dakota, where I live-- if we make a mistake, for example, in the planning commission in the city on some long-term capital expenditures and we put new wells in place before storm sewers, or we begin to get some things out of sync in the development of the community, the long-term effects can be incredibly staggering and can spell the difference between rapid growth, no growth, or even decline, so that I think we're under pressure here because of more limited resources to make better quality decisions.

And my sense is that sort of goes against the whole understanding that, as you're suggesting, that I also hear around, that somehow, those of us out in this part of the country are second-class citizens. And I just don't believe that for a minute.

VICKIE STURGEON: Earlier, you mentioned something that may be one of the drawbacks, too, in a small town about that close proximity of those people was that they tend to set up artificial constraints on what they can and can't do.

And I wonder if that is maybe the reason or why some people often see what's happening in small towns, well, as not happening, that they see small towns as stagnant, because the people who are there, organizing and doing things, do tend to put up those constraints and won't challenge other people in their community. Does that happen?

VIC PAVLENKO: I don't know if it happens or not, but, I mean, I buy your assumption for now, at least in terms of saying that our interest, again, going back to this business that when we're in the community, we're actually interested in seeing that people achieve something. And at that point, you're dealing with the whole business of how are you defining the problem? And what are the goals that you've got in mind? And how are you going to implement those goals?

And one of the things, when people begin to operate that way, that they have to come to grips with is, who's going to try and prevent us from implementing these goals or what other forces? And those become power equations.

And we just spend a lot of time working with people, trying to, in essence, explode the constraints. Are they real or are they imagined? And I would assume that you could, over a period of time, through neighboring with the same people for 10 or 15, or 20, or 50 years, assume that there are some things that are fixed in terms of who wants what kinds of things to happen and not happen in a community, and to make some assumptions that they, in fact, have the resources to combat your idea.

And I think those are always open questions. And they need to be tested, realistically tested, because I think we assume more constraints than are there.

KIM HODGSON: Vic Pavlenko, the director of CENCOAD, the Center for Community Organization and Area Development, based at Augustana College in Sioux Falls.

[PIANO MUSIC]

JOE PADDOCK: We were in Olivia watching-- or not Olivia, but Minnesota, watching a sort of variety show in the school auditorium. And one of the most interesting things they had there was a group of little tiny kid acrobats someplace between 4 and 6 or 7 years old, I suppose. And they were awfully good.

And of course, the town was just charmed by them. If they hadn't been good, they would have been charmed by them because everybody knew them. In a way, they're all their own children. Everybody is sort of involved with bringing up the children in a real community.

And they all take pride in them, as they do later on, I suppose, in their athletic teams, and that sort of thing. In a way, we all win when we're part of this community. And this "Tiny Mother's Emotion" poem I wrote is about these child acrobats.

In Minnesota, little tiddlywinks kids in glinting sequins were acrobats and danced on the stage.

Tiny girls, with the assurance of mothers, did cartwheels and bridges, and walked on their hands.

They sprang away from their whirling, leaving something, some light from their flesh, still spinning before their limp and elegant hands as they bowed.

And they, in a way, because the community was so much behind them, were transported to something more than they really were. All of a sudden, they became elegant.

NANCY PADDOCK: This is Clyde and Ginny Litsky talking about the Old Settlers Reunion that they used to have in Olivia.

JOE PADDOCK: Used to be an Old Settlers Reunion. I don't remember just when that was, but that was a big deal every year, a big picnic. Everybody got to it.

NANCY PADDOCK: I remember, they had one up here at Nestor Park. That was about one of the last, I think.

JOE PADDOCK: Nowadays, people don't go any place, just watch television. It's the ruination of the country. The churches all had picnics every year. In June, I always had a big picnic, go out to some farm, and have races and stands, and everything else, races. And there was always a baseball game, horseshoes. We had a stronger sense of community.

NANCY PADDOCK: Everybody knew everybody in town. And everybody was somebody's friend. We lived in town for 50 years, and there wasn't anybody we didn't know. And now, they come and go.

Those settlers picnics were in the '30s yet, I'm sure, because I remember them. They used to be quite the thing. And the ones that I went to, they'd have a program and speakers. And Katie [? Byrnes ?] would sing there too. And they'd have a lunch, and we'd play games and things like that. It was real fun.

There was a lot of kids there. And now, the kids don't want to go to anything like that. The family was together. Family togetherness was the thing. When the family would go for a ride on Sunday, the whole family would go. Now, mother and dad go, and the kids stay home.

JOE PADDOCK: One guy told me all these memories. He said, it was all painful. Nothing good about it at all, he said, when you went through it. But in retrospect, of course, the beauty and the warmth begins to shine through.

NANCY PADDOCK: David Evans, who is a South Dakota poet, has a poem about how, when things change, you find you can't find your way home again. It's called "A Poem on the Changing of Wall Street into Floyd Boulevard in My Hometown, Sioux City."

Driving up the street that used to stop 20 years ago at Allan Cooley's house,

No longer there, on the edge of a bluff,

A street that now breaks out over the city into a convenient boulevard

That goes right by the only brick house on Wall and white picket fence where I grew up.

Suddenly, I am a man who won't be stopping here again, a man always going by.

JOE PADDOCK: That's a real problem. That is, you can't find your way back if you grew up in a community, and it was a true community, and you want to get back to that sort of warmth and togetherness that you once knew.

And I had that experience growing up in Litchfield. It's not there, for me. You change your values. You develop different ways of responding to things in the world. That's part of it.

I think for some people, it's still there. The community still exists, but you find yourself trying to fit in. A lot of the things you learn are good. For instance, things like maybe there's a little latent racism in a community, like where I grew up. You go back in and, all of a sudden, you realize you're cut off from people's attitudes there, and you're sort of constantly missing. So you go back and sit in the same place, but you haven't been able to find your way home. And I think it's a serious problem. And I think an awful lot of poets have been writing a great deal about it.

I wrote a poem about it that's maybe a little more positive than the way I just sounded, though. And I think I'll read that here. It's called "Circling Back."

That circle back to our beginnings,

We pitched horseshoes and fished,

Lived so close that loneliness lived only in the unfeeling jokes about old women

Our beginnings, we now know, are as good as anything else,

And better, because they are the bed in which we slept.

They are the face we bore before ever we saw a mirror.

In that limbo of beginnings to get away,

I used to say, there's no place to go.

There's nothing to be done,

But didn't believe at the bone till I got just got awful tired of daytime's insomnia.

Oh smash the mirror with the aging face.

Sleep in the bed with the smiling dreams.

[ORGAN MUSIC]

NANCY PADDOCK: Wendell Berry has a poem called "At a Country Funeral." And I think that poem makes the connection between, oh, the things are being lost. And yet, he has found a place where he wants to make a stand on the Earth, and to make connection with the old values and have a community.

"Now, the old ways that have brought us farther than we remember

Sink out of sight as under the treading of many strangers ignorant of landmarks.

Only once in a while they are cast clear again upon the mind,

As at a country funeral, where, amid the soft lights and hothouse flowers,

The expensive solemnity of experts, notes of a polite musician, persists the usages of old neighborhood.

Friends and kinsmen come, and stand, and speak,

Knowing the extremity they have come to,

One of their own, bearing to the Earth the last of his light,

his darkness, the sun's definitive mark.

They stand and think, as they stood and thought, when even the gods were different.

And the organ music, though decorous as for somebody else's grief, has its source

In the outcry of pain, and hope in log churches, and on naked hillsides by the open grave, eastward in mountain passes, in tidelands, and across the sea.

How long a time.

Rock of ages, cleft for me.

Let me hide myself in Thee.

They came, once in time, in simple loyalty to their dead and returned to the world.

The fields and the work remain to be returned to.

Now, the entrance of one of the old ones into the rock, too, often means a lifework perished from the land without inheritor,

And the field goes wild, and the house sits and stares,

Or it passes at cash value into the hands of strangers.

Now, the old dead wait in the open coffin for the blood kin to gather.

Come home for one last time to hear old men whose tongues bear an essential topography speak memories doomed to die.

But our memory of ourselves, hard-earned, is one of the land's seeds,

As a seed is the memory of a life of its kind in its place

To pass on into life the knowledge of what has died.

What we owe the future is not a new start, for we can only begin with what has happened.

We owe the future the past, the long knowledge that is the potency of time to come.

That makes of a man's grave a rich furrow.

The community of knowing in common is a seed of our life in this place.

There is not only no better possibility,

There is no other except for chaos and darkness,

The terrible ground of the only possible new start.

And so as the old die and the young depart, where shall a man go who keeps the memories of the dead except home again, as one would go back after a burial?

Faithful to the fields, lest the dead die a second and more final death."

[ORGAN MUSIC]

JOE PADDOCK: This sense of being cut off from community is one of the most symptomatic problems of our culture now. Basically, urban. But we happen to be living out here on the agricultural prairies, in an area where there is community yet. And I was struck by the fact that Olivia was still a real community. And sort of wistfully, I wrote, at the end of my introduction to this oral history of the town, I wrote this little paragraph.

"People who have community live in it in a way one wears a comfortable old coat. They aren't even aware they have it on. But if, on a cold winter's day, someone were to take it away from them, they would know full well it was gone."

NANCY PADDOCK: I think there's a sort of nourishment that comes from community. And Harris Nelson, who was in Olivia to perform at the Corn Land Festival, talks about how he went back to the old cemetery at a time when he wanted to be alone and found some strengthening there.

"During the Corn Land Festival, I wanted to get away from people for a while because I know so many people here. They talk to me, remember me. So when I was through with my show, I had to get some freedom because that wore me out.

So where could I go in town? There is no Nelson left in town except Vivian Nelson, a sister-in-law who works up in the hospital, and her apartment is closed. So you know where I went? The cemetery. I went out there, and I walked around and saw all these people I used to know.

And finally, after a half hour, I parked my car in the far corner, where two famous men are buried, Lauerman and Cosgriff, two pillars of the city. Cosgriff, his son is still the doctor. And Lauerman, the only graves in that area.

So I parked under a fir tree, and curled up, and went to sleep. Did that two nights in a row. Two nights like that, a little rest like that, and I'm ready to go again."

[SINGING "HOME IS WHERE THERE IS ONE TO LOVE US"]

There's one to love

Home is where there is one to love us

Home is where there is one to love us

Home is where

Home is where

There's no place like home

There's no place like home

[MUSIC PLAYING]

KIM HODGSON: Nancy and Joe Paddock. The Poet's Perspective portion of our program is made possible in part with funds provided by the Minnesota Humanities Commission. Joe and Nancy are regional poets and residents in a program sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Southwest Minnesota Arts and Humanities Council.

(SINGING) with none to meet

None to welcome, none to greet us?

Home is sweet, and only sweet

Where there's one we love to meet us

Home is where there is one to love us

Home is where

Home is where

There's no place like home

There's no place like home

Home is where

[MUSIC PLAYING]

VICKIE STURGEON: You've been listening to The Poet's Perspective, a series of nine programs funded in part by the Minnesota Humanities Commission. The program featured Southwest Minnesota regional poets, Joe and Nancy Paddock. And the series was produced in the Worthington studios of Minnesota Public Radio station, KRSW. Staff members at KRSW responsible for the project were Kim and Judy Hodgson. And I'm Vickie Sturgeon.

[MUSIC PLAYING]