Small Towns And Big Values

Small towns such as Jennings, Louisiana, were once the bedrock of American life.  That's where I was delivered into the world in 1946.  It was an era when most Americans lived in rural towns.  Agriculture, farming and oil thrived outside the big cities.  Life poked along in the slow lane.

Jennings, population 9,663, had a flourishing downtown.  Mercantile, clothing, feed, diners and a drug store dotted the streets. There was even a movie theatre.  People waved a friendly hello as you walked or drove.  You addressed men as "sir" and women as "mam." No exceptions.

There were almost as many churches as there were flavors of religions.  Houses of worship were cramped on Sundays with spiffily dressed folks, including kids.  No one wore flip flops.  You were lucky to own one nice pair of pants, but if you did, it was reserved for Sunday use only.

Each school day opened with the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag followed by a prayer.  No one was offended.  Weekends were for family gatherings.  My Dad's brother Francis, wife Pauline, and kids Monica and Mike lived next door.  Sharing meals and conversation with family was sublime. 

When school recessed, I did not jet to Martha's Vineyard.  I summered in Iota, Louisiana, population 1,500.  My sister Charlene and I had some of the happiest times visiting with my grandparents, Fernan and Gussie Roy. I scaled trees, plucked wild blackberries and explored the surroundings.

A favorite summer ritual was a daily trip to the tiny Iota post office with my grandpa. All the men dressed up to fetch the mail.  Most wore hats and suspenders.  Town gossip and a runaway cow were the topics of discussion.  I learned a lot about life eavesdropping on the Cajun-accented discourse.

Although our family moved five times, each instance we landed in a town of less than 34,000 residents.  It wasn't until I reached the ripe old age of 24 that I discovered big city life in Dallas. I never again inhabited a small town.  Yet I wax nostalgic for small town values and experiences.

Today small towns are battling for their very existence.  There are 46.1 million Americans--about 14% of the population--residing in non-metropolitan counties spread across 72% of the nation's land mass.  In 2015, there were 16,470 cities with populations under 10,000 and dwindling.

Since 2010, 1,350 non-metro counties have lost 790,000 people.  (Statistics for small towns are elusive because Census data is not available.) In just one year period between July of 2015 and July 2016, the population in non-metro counties dipped another 40,000.

Small farms and agriculture, once a staple of rural America, are vanishing. In 1946, there were about 5.6 million farms in the country.  In 2012, that number had shrunk to 2 million as farms became fewer and larger.  Agriculture's role in the economy, once 33%, has shriveled to about 12%.

Some would call this progress.  After all, Silicon Valley and other high-tech incubators are flush with jobs and money. Farm workers have been left in the dust.  There were 3.4 million farm workers at the turn of the century.  Now there are barely 1 million.  Their average median pay is $11.41 per hour.

My Dad, like many returning World War II veterans, found employment in the agricultural business.  It became a career that sustained our family.  One of the benefits was Dad always had milled rice to put on our table. I think we gobbled more rice than the average family in Asia during those days.

Not only has the agricultural downturn sapped rural towns, but these quaint places have lost their local retail shopping.  Walmart has replaced the local clothing, mercantile and drug stores.  Homegrown grocery stores are practically extinct, swept into oblivion by behemoth chain grocers.

No doubt these changes have meant more selection and lower prices but there was something whimsical about a small town store. No one ever accused Walmart of being charming. And don't get me started on those omnipresent Golden Arches that are a blight on rural America's landscape.

Today driving through these towns is depressing.  Downtowns no longer exist, unless you consider sagging, empty or boarded-up buildings signs of an economic pulse.  To survive, a few small towns have become a clutter of antique shops hawking mostly junk.  Not the stuff of my youth.

Am I beginning to sound like an old fogy?  Perhaps it is a sign of senior seasoning, but I pine for those small towns and the values embraced by their residents.  In the metropolises of America, you are often mocked for patriotism, belief in God, family ties and a humble lifestyle.

Small towns likely will never recover from their spiral into obscurity.  But Americans would be well served to cling to small town values.  Family, faith and patriotism remain at the heart of what we know as the American experience.  If we ever lose that, more than small towns will be gone forever.