Dewey: The Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched The World

In time, my father inherited his land and started the hard work of running a family farm, but first he learned to dance. Dancing was off-limits to most Baptists, but Verlyn “Jipp” Jipson was fifteen years younger than his four siblings, and his parents indulged him. As a young man, Jipp would slip out and drive the truck an hour to the Roof Garden, a 1920s gilded-era resort on the edge of Lake Okoboji, for their Friday-night dances. Okoboji is a mystical name in Iowa. West Okoboji, the centerpiece of a chain of five lakes, is the only blue-water, spring-fed lake in the state, and people come from Nebraska and even Minnesota, a state with a few lakes of its own, to the hotels along its shore. In the late 1940s, the hottest spot in the area, maybe even the whole state of Iowa, was the Roof Garden. Every big-name swing band played the joint, and often the ballroom was so packed you couldn’t move. World War II was over, and the party seemed like it would go on forever. Outside, on the boardwalk, there was a roller coaster, a Ferris wheel, and enough lights, sounds, and pretty girls to make you forget that Lake Okoboji was a brilliant blue pinprick in the vast emptiness of the Great American Plains.

And there, in that little circle of light, Jipp Jipson met Marie Mayou. They danced the night away, and just about every other night for the next six months. My father kept the relationship a secret because he knew his family would never approve. The Mayous weren’t like the Jipsons. They were full-blooded French by way of Montreal, and they were fiery, passionate people. They loved hard, fought hard, drank hard, and even churched hard, with a no-nonsense midwestern Catholicism that almost scorched the earth.

The Mayous owned the town café in Royal, Iowa, about ten miles from Dad’s farm. My mother’s father was a wonderful man: gregarious, honest, kind. He was also a full-blown alcoholic. As a child, Mom would leave school to work the lunch rush, then head back to school for a few hours in the afternoon. Often her father would be passed out in one of the booths, so Mom would have to get him off to bed and out of the way of the paying customers.

It wasn’t that Marie Mayou’s family was notorious. Ten miles was a long way in 1940s Iowa. The problem was that they were Catholic. So Mom and Dad ran away to Minnesota to get married. The wound from the elopement took a few years to heal, but practical always prevails in Iowa. If a deed is done, it’s time to move on. Mom and Dad settled down on the family farm and soon had the first three of their six children, two boys (David and Mike) and a girl. I was the middle child.

The family farm. The idea has been romanticized, but for most of the history of the world family farming has been a difficult, poorly paid, backbreaking enterprise. The Jipson farm was no different. We had a cold water hand pump in the kitchen that you physically had to prime. We had a washing machine in the root cellar, but you had to heat the water on the stove upstairs. After the clothes were washed, you cranked them one by one through rollers to wring out the excess water, then hung them outside on the line. We had a shower in the corner of the root cellar. The walls were concrete, but we had tile on the floor. That was our luxury.

Air-conditioning? I didn’t know such a thing existed. Mom worked in her kitchen six hours a day over an open flame, even in hundred-degree heat. The kids slept upstairs, and it was so hot on humid summer nights we’d take our pillows downstairs and sleep on the dining room floor. Linoleum was the coolest surface in the house.

Indoor plumbing? Until I was ten years old, we used a one-hole outhouse. When the outhouse became full, you simply dug a new hole and moved the shack. Hard to believe now, looking back, but it’s true.

It was the best childhood, the very best. I wouldn’t trade it for all the money in Des Moines. Why worry about new toys and clothes? No one we knew had those. We handed down clothes. We handed down toys. There was no television, so we talked to each other. Our big trip was once a year to the municipal swimming pool in Spencer. Every morning we woke up together, and then we worked together.

When I was ten, Mom and Dad had their second set of three children—Steven, Val, and Doug. I raised those children alongside Mom. We were Jipsons. We were there for each other. It’s dark on a farm at night, and empty, and lonely, but I knew there was nothing out there in the world that could harm me—not Russians, not rockets, not thieves. I had my family. And if things got really bad, I had the cornfield. I could always run into it and disappear.