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

The old family farmers raised livestock. They planted gardens. They grew crops in distinct, smaller fields. On the large new farms, there was only corn and its companion crop, soybeans. Every year Iowa grew more corn, but we ate less and less of the crop, at least as kernels and cobs. Most was used as animal feed. Some eventually became ethanol. The rest was separated, broken down, and processed. Have you ever wondered what xanthan gum is? It’s processed corn, like almost everything else in that long list of unidentifiable ingredients printed on the packaging of your dinner. Seventy percent of the average American diet—70 percent!—is corn.

But life in farm country isn’t easy. A few large farms are worth a fortune, but for most farmers and the people who rely on them—farmhands, salesmen, storage facilities, processing plants, local merchants—the money is tight, the work is hard, and life is often beyond your control. If it doesn’t rain; if it doesn’t stop raining; if it gets too hot or too cold; if prices don’t hold up when your product hits market, there’s not much you can do. Farm life isn’t forty acres and a mule anymore. Farmers need large combines to plow big fields, and they can cost $500,000 or more. Throw in seed, chemicals, and living expenses, and a farmer’s debt can easily top a million. If they stumble, or fall behind the times, or simply have a run of bad luck, most can’t make it.

The same is true of the towns in farm country. Towns are, after all, a collection of people. The town relies on the people; the people rely on the town. Like the pollen and the corn silk, they are interdependent. That’s why the people of northwest Iowa take such pride in their towns. That’s why they invest so much energy in making their towns work. They plant trees; they build parks; they join community organizations. They know if a town is not constantly looking ahead, it can fall behind, and then it can die.

Some people think the grain elevator burning down in the 1930s ruined the town of Moneta. I think it was the closing of the Moneta School. After the Jipson kids started being bused ten miles away to Hartley in 1959, Dad lost interest in struggling against the farm. Our land didn’t produce, and Dad couldn’t afford big new machinery. He joined a cattle-buying business, then started selling insurance. The Jipsons had been on the farmstead for three generations, but two years after the Moneta School closed Dad sold out to a neighbor and went into insurance full-time. He hated it, hated having to use scare tactics and lowball families in their time of need. He ended up working as a salesman for Crow brand seed. The neighbor who bought our land leveled our farmhouse, chopped down our trees, and turned the entire 160 acres into farmland. He even straightened the creek. I often drive by now without even recognizing it. The first four feet of our dirt driveway is all that remains of my childhood.

Drive fifteen miles west of Spencer today and there’s still a sign on the side of the road for Moneta. Turn left. Two miles down the pavement ends, leaving only a dirt track running between the fields. But there isn’t a town. There are maybe fifteen houses, at least half of them abandoned. There isn’t a single business to be seen. Almost all the buildings on the old downtown strip I remember from my childhood are gone, replaced by a cornfield. You can stand at the former spot of the Moneta general store, where kids would stand transfixed in front of the giant counter full of penny candies and whistles, and watch the cultivators, cone-shaped chutes in front and barrels of fertilizer and poison strapped on the back, crawl across fields like tiny grasshoppers tiptoeing across a vast emptiness. The dance hall remains, and the old speakeasy, but both are shuttered. In a few years, they’ll probably be gone, too.

The Moneta School still stands behind, but volunteer trees are growing between the bricks. Most of the windows are broken. Goats lived in the building for a decade, wrecking the floors and biting holes in the walls, and you can still smell them. The only thing left is the reunion. Forty years after the closing of the Moneta School, the annual reunion still drew a thousand people a year back to the field where we used to hold those baseball games and end-of-the-year parties. Now the reunion is down to a hundred or so. The school has been closed fifty years; there aren’t that many graduates left. Soon the sign on Highway 18 will be the last thing standing, still pointing two miles down the lonely road to Moneta.

Chapter 7

Grand Avenue

The farm crisis of the 1980s was hard, but most of us never truly believed Spencer would go the way of Moneta. We never believed it would give up, blow away, disappear. Throughout its history, after all, the town had proved its resilience. Nothing had ever been handed to Spencer or its citizens. What we’d gotten, we’d earned.