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

We weren’t really alone, of course. Each square mile of farmland, bordered on all sides by those perfectly straight Iowa roads, was called a section. In those days, most sections held four family-owned farms. Three and a half of the families in our section were Catholic (we were the half), and there were seventeen children among them, so we had our own baseball game. Even if only four kids showed up, we played baseball. I can’t remember thinking about any other game. I was small, but by the time I was twelve, I could hit a baseball across the ditch and into the corn. Every night we huddled around the Jipson family table and gave thanks to God that we’d gone another day without losing our baseball in the corn.

Two miles from our eastern field, at the end of the second section, was the town of Moneta, Iowa. Spencer and Moneta were only twenty miles apart, but they might as well have been different worlds. Some might call that twenty-mile stretch nondescript, but if you drive it in September, when the sky is darkening with blue storm clouds and the crops form patches in every glorious shade of brown, you’d be hard-pressed not to call it beautiful. The highlight is probably the faded wooden billboard outside the town of Everly saluting the 1966 Iowa Girl’s Basketball Champions. I remember that team. Everly beat us by a point in the regional finals, which were held in Spencer. I’d tell you about the game, but it’s already taken longer to mention the sign than it takes to pass through Everly, which has only five hundred people.

The population of Moneta never reached five hundred, but it topped that number if you included all the farmers, like my family, who thought of themselves as members of that wonderful community. In the 1930s, Moneta was the gambling capital of northwest Iowa. The restaurant on Main Street was a speakeasy, and there was a gambling hall in the back accessible through a secret door. By the time I was a child, those legends were long gone, replaced in our imaginations by the baseball field and the bees. Every community has something the children remember. Come to Spencer in sixty years and the older people will say, “We had a cat. He lived in the library. What was his name? Oh, yes, Dewey. I’ll always remember Dewey.” In Moneta, it was the bees. A local family had sixty hives, and the honey was famous in four counties, which seemed like the whole world.

The centerpiece of town, though, was the Moneta School, a ten-room, two-story redbrick building just down the road from the baseball field. Almost everyone in town had attended the Moneta School, at least for a few years. There were only eight children in my grade, but what we lacked in size we made up for in amenities. Two local women cooked homemade meals for the whole school every day. Janet and I, the only girls in our class, often got special permission to go over in the morning and frost the cinnamon rolls. If you had a problem, a teacher would walk you to the hidden circle in the grove of trees behind the school where you could talk it out one-on-one. If you wanted to be alone, or with a special someone, you went to the grove, too. That’s where I got my first kiss. The Moneta School had a party at the end of every school year with sack races, horse races, and, of course, baseball games. The whole town brought picnics. Everybody participated. In the middle of the summer, when the corn was so high it surrounded the town like a wall, there was the Moneta School reunion, which in the 1950s drew several thousand people. Everyone was proud of that school. Everyone.

Then, in 1959, the state of Iowa shuttered the Moneta School. The town had been on a long population slide, and the state could no longer justify the expense. Moneta had always been a hub for local farmers, but farming was changing. In the early 1950s, the first generation of giant harvesters and combines allowed farmers to plow and harvest larger fields. Some farmers bought new machines, then bought out their neighbors and doubled their production, then used that money to buy out more neighbors. Farm families began to disappear, moving away to local population centers like Spencer, and with them went the farmhouses, the family gardens, and the rows of trees the original settlers had planted to protect the house from the summer sun and the winter wind. These were huge trees, five feet around and a hundred years old. When larger farmers moved in, they bulldozed everything—trees, buildings, everything—piled it up, and burned it to the ground. Why keep a house nobody’s living in when you could have a field? The land went back, but not to nature. It went to corn.