There are a lot of awfully good
things to tell about Kewanee. The park system, for
instance, which is the best for a town of that size
that I can imagine; it's thanks largely, as I
understand, to the founder of the boiler company, E.E.
Baker, who, many, many years ago, gave land to the
city for what turned out to be a truly spectacular
park system, including one park with a huge swimming
pool and another with a lake for fishing and skating.
As I kid, I loved those parks; they were always full
of picnic group, church picnics in the summer, soft
ball games, volley ball, etc. Great place to grow up.

In fact, Kewanee as a whole was a great place to grow
up. Quiet streets arched with elm trees, until the elm
disease took them out 50 years ago -- but now the
trees are back and it looks fine again. It was the
sort of town, back in the '50s when I grew up, that
would make a setting for a movie about small-town life
in the Midwest. You could walk to school, find a park
within a few blocks to play ball or swing, go to the
corner grocery store for a Popsicle or to pick up a
gallon of milk without driving to the supermarket, go
to the movies (it was 9 cents for kids when I was
quite small, but half-way through grade school it went
up to 15 cents, as I recall, and then 25 cents by the
time I was in high school, if memory serves). 

Kewanee was a great place for a kid to grow up in
those days. You could find anything you wanted to buy
-- the business district was booming. Lots of little
restaurants, all locally owned. People knew each other
and pitched in to help with this or that. Lots of
churches, which were mostly full on Sundays. There
were four Roman Catholic churches, each pretty much
aligned with a particular nationality -- Irish at one,
Polish at another, Belgian at another, if I remember
right, and it seems to me one was primarily
Lithuanian.

Industry drew a lot of people to Kewanee, hence the
rich diversity of the population. You could go to the
Lutheran church for the annual smorgasbord and the
Polish church for kielbasa. Rich, rich cultural
heritage.

The schools were excellent. When I was in high school
back then, you could still take four years of Latin,
along with French and Spanish. Excellent facilities
for science, theater, sports. The high school had its
own FM radio station, in fact. And the teachers were
outstanding -- you really got educated in those
schools.

There are a lot of really good things that could be
said about growing up in Kewanee. But it was a time
before the national chains swept in and replaced all
the local businesses -- grocery stores, gas stations,
hardware stores, restaurants, etc. And that, of
course, applies across America, not just Kewanee. When
the interstate highways came along and made it so easy
to get to larger places with shopping malls, the
small-town culture had to yield. And in more recent
years, of course, the Internet has again remodeled the
way people shop and removed the borders of the small
towns -- what used to be little islands amid the
farmland just became part of the rest of the world, in
a sense. You can't go to Butterwick's or Albrecht's
hardware store any more -- you have to go to TruValue
or Ace; Davidson's and Pierce's are gone, and you have
Pizza Hut and KFC instead; Kirley's and The Vogue are
gone, so you have to go to the mall for clothes. There
is no turning back the march of history. 

We did have Penny's, though. And once, when I was six,
I met J.C. Penny. He was visiting his stores and
meeting customers in person. Imagine that now. He was
old, but everybody looked old to me then. I do
remember he was very friendly and bent over and
smiled, and shook my hand. I thought if J.C. Penny can
take time to shake the hand of a six-year-old, I want
to shop at Penny's. I'm glad we still have Penny's
stores, even if you do have to go the mall to find
one.

So yes, indeed there are a lot of things that come to
mind when I really think about what it was like in
Kewanee, growing up. And of course the Kewanee story
is repeated all across America, and anybody my age
(62) can no doubt recall the same blessings of growing
up in their towns -- even though the names of the
stores were different, the general nostalgia is the
same.

But Kewanee certainly did set itself apart with that
park system -- that was unique, and still is.

Brian Alm

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