THE PARTY'S OVER IN DIXON, ILL.
Williams, Mary
Reaganomio comes home The Party's Over in Dixon, III. BY MARY WILLIAMS_ "When I was nine, we moved to Dixon. It was ninety miles from Chicago. . . . A small town often thousand—to me it was a...
...Waiting and hoping for the winter freeze without snow so that we could go skating on the Rock River...
...And yet, evidently not everyone in the town shared the same favorable image...
...where young Charles Walgreen could start as an apprentice in a downtown drugstore and build it into a nationwide chain...
...Presuming the economy will get worse, I expect we'll be seeing even more of that...
...Listen—Ronald Reagan has broken his word and his promises on almost everything that he's campaigned for...
...Only the future will tell what great prosperity is in store for every aspect of community life in Dixon...
...They want the truth, they are friendly and helpful, intelligent and alert...
...No plume of smoke drifts from the stack...
...Everywhere, signs with Reagan's smiling face direct the visitor downtown, or to the "official center," as the business district is now called...
...Their stories, too often, get lost in the ruffles and flourishes from Washington, and in the empty Our-Town boosterism...
...Here is a man who's been a carpenter all his life and has different ideas than I have...
...Frey would probably balk at the suggestion he donate free carpentry to any Reagan shrine today, and the other union members who have been showing up at Alliance meetings share his attitude...
...They are concerned, not with security as some would have us believe, but with their very firm personal liberties...
...Dixon has grown since Reagan lived here in the 1920s and early 1930s, but the population has fallen off by about 15 per cent since the late 1960s...
...Neil Reagan, the President's brother, who first called the project "stupid," is now honorary chairman of the restoration committee...
...We Support DDC," they say...
...A sign in the front window of the low, cinderblock building on the edge of town says it all: "No work...
...This is a strong Republican area—real strong," he says...
...Public opinion polls show that 50 per cent and more of Americans still prefer small-town over urban life...
...The rest of the shingles are heaped in an upstairs room awaiting roofing weather...
...Now I make a good salary every week—I'm doing good and they're not...
...Some never sally forth but marry high school sweethearts and settle down to tend the family farm or retail store...
...People had reason to feel some degree of control over their lives...
...There, the World War I memorial arch still stands over Galena Avenue, the last of its kind in America...
...Young people, who a few years ago were lost to the community after college or military service, now return after sampling the outside world...
...He blames the layoffs and shop closings around town...
...With the drugs and the booze and the way that the morals have gone in our country, I just wonder when these little children reach adulthood what it's going to be like...
...A bit farther along, the visitor passes signs: "Welcome to Dixon, Home of Hey Brothers Ice Cream & President Ronald 'Dutch' Reagan...
...Ronald\Reagan, in his autobiography, "Where s the Rest of Me...
...He doesn't even know how to spell poor...
...I get more than I need and they don't...
...My parents live in South Carolina...
...I never have asked for anything more, then or now...
...Let me say that I believe in the /Screen Actors Guildj with all my heart...
...Fine, the others told him, if you can get it off the ground...
...I think the increase in family problems may be a direct correlation with the economic factors...
...It's not easy to bring public employes and labor together...
...For fifty cents, one can buy a wooden shingle, sign it with a felt-tip pen, and know that some day it would be part of a new roof...
...Call it huckstering, call it salesmanship)—whatever it is, it seems at first glance to be thriving in downtown Dixon...
...Father Bernard Quinn, quoted in "Small Town America," by Richard Lingeman On Sunday, it was hard to find a place to park in downtown Dixon...
...He followed friends who had gone to Texas before him and found work—jobs that may not have paid well but at least offered the chance to put in long overtime hours...
...These urban refugees hold on to the hope, perhaps, because of what towns like Dixon have been in the past...
...Maybe the President would expect me to draw that conclusion about the Florida vacationers and Catherine...
...There was a time when the Dixon police had to direct the heavy traffic every Friday night when the farmers came into town, but that was years ago...
...jrom a jg^g brochure of the Dixon Chamber of Commerce "Damn it, too many of our political leaders, our labor leaders, and certainly a lot of geniuses in my own business and on Madison Avenue have underestimated [middle-class Americansj...
...People are saying it's because there's less money in the family, or they're saying it's because they're together more and they're getting on each other's nerves...
...And when the rest of the economy is in a recession, we're not particularly affected by that, either...
...Dixon is that place for me...
...When I was in Dixon, some 1,400 workers were waiting to hear whether they would join the rest of Dixon's unemployed...
...To my left was a well-dressed couple, their tans still aglow from the annual Florida vacation...
...On the roof of the plant is a sign in red, white, and blue: "Welcome to Dixon, Home of Raynor Garage Doors and Ronald Reagan...
...It seems it's just the uncertainty of starting out that's holding a lot of them back...
...One of them is Fred "Dusty" Nordstrom, a mental health specialist who has worked at the DDC for eight years...
...But at the same time, some now question the all-American assumption that life will be good to them and even better to their children and grandchildren...
...You've got to realize what they're doing to the minds of those employes right now," Nordstrom says...
...Fear affects people...
...Down at Hennepin and First, where crowds danced and sloshed their beer on election night, stores stand empty with metal brackets that once held signs now rusting above the doors...
...Some of the friends he left behind in Dixon told him that once he got "set up," they would come down and try their luck too...
...This one, once topped with a large petunia— Dixon calls itself the Petunia Capital of the World because of the flowers that line its streets in the summer—now greets the visitor with the words "Welcome . . . Hometown of Ronald Reagan...
...Now, he says, some of them are beginning to plead that the Alliance work with them...
...The DDC, or Dixon Developmental Center, is the euphemistic name of a sixty-four-year-old state institution for the handicapped...
...After that I turned really eager and I have considered myself a rabid union man ever since...
...He points to Frey...
...When fear arrived on Main Street, confidence packed up and left...
...Ronald Reagan and his mother attended the First Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), so I went there too...
...Inside, there were punch and birthday cake, and brochures to tell visitors that "growing up in Dixon, our fortieth President learned the virtues of family, church, and hardwork which will guide our country for the coming years...
...Ronald Reagan, in "Where's the Rest of Me...
...Does this mean the group can shape public policy in Dixon...
...People from almost fifty countries have done that, and the most exotic autographs hang on one wall, bringing felt-tip messages from a troubled world into this conservative sanctuary: "Justice for the Palestinians Free Free Palestine...
...I might take off and try to live down there...
...Going on reading binges in the public library or in the park...
...Nor have they given up on their patriotism, judging from the flags flying, even on Sunday, above the courthouse, the schools, the churches, the telephone company...
...from an article in Sphere/The Betty Crocker Magazine, November 1973 Dawn Chupp and Joe Grubic have been together for about three years now...
...If my job goes, I'm in big trouble," he adds...
...I have some debts to pay off—not to mention food and rent...
...But people get information very quickly, and I think the national economy frightens people...
...But now I'm not sure.' And I think she's right...
...In his off hours, Nordstrom has become something of a semi-professional photographer, picking up money on weddings and other free-lance work here and there...
...The way the world situation is today makes me sad...
...New Queen to Be Crowned at Pork Producers' Dinner"), flipping through brochures from the Chamber of Commerce—piecing together any fragments that might complete a picture of the place that helped make Ronald Reagan what he says he is...
...Hey, do you know that this is the answer right here...
...A small town often thousand—to me it was a city...
...No registration...
...She didn't know what she would get if the place closed...
...And now it comes and hits you in the face...
...I don't know if I'll ever get there...
...Instead, the talk is of layoffs and plant closings, in bars, in check-out lines, and at the counter of the McDonald's that now stands on the site of a former Reagan homestead, one of five in town...
...I was doing all right for myself...
...And fear is fear...
...If this is a bleak picture of a Midwestern town, perhaps it is because so few journalists have spoken for the Catherines who live in America's Dixons...
...easy camaraderie...
...Jobs were secure, for the most part...
...She has no money to move, and besides, in six more years ("God, that's a long time," she sighs) she will be able to draw the pension she has paid into at her job...
...where a kid born in a cheap five-room flat above a general store up the road could grow up to be President...
...More and more, the nation's economy is bringing the nation's troubles home to places like Dixon...
...Isn't it a shame that Ronald Reagan's finally in office, and we've waited all these years to band together to protect ourselves from him, right here in his home town...
...They have reason to be...
...It would definitely be different if I had a steady job," Grubic says...
...Gentle manners...
...But not my camera...
...At the DDC...
...The carpenters volunteered their time and labor to shore up the porch, but these days, many of them are putting their energy elsewhere...
...Now the crowds are somewhere else...
...Welcome Hometown of Ronald Reagan Dixon Noon Lions Club...
...Sitting in The Family Theatre, watching the marvelous flickering antics of Tom Mix and William S. Hart as they foiled robbers and villains and escorted the beautiful girls to safety, waving back from their horses as they cantered into the sunset...
...Out at the Sinnissippi Mental Health Center west of town, so many more people are coming in with family troubles these days that the clinic is hiring more family therapists and setting up programs to handle the influx...
...Red, white and blue streamers spanned the parking meters...
...only the future can tell what changes will continue to be made...
...Plans to turn the bathroom back into the President's bedroom are no more than some lines of masking tape on the hardwood floor...
...A lot of job-seekers show up at the union hall where she works, Contreras says, but "we don't even take any applications now because there's no point in it...
...No longer is the small American town a sanctuary from urban ills...
...If she could keep her job there five more years, Catherine said, she would draw a pension...
...And I'm sure that if I had a little grandchild to worry about it would frighten me a whole lot more...
...I am no stranger to such places, having grown up in a northern Wisconsin version of Dixon...
...30,000...
...He worked as a truck driver and track laborer for the Burlington Northern railroad until he was laid off last fall...
...But I'll tell you: Most of the labor in this area believe Reaganomics doesn't work...
...I think the people in the city have always known this," Prindaville says...
...But the fine location of the city, the financially sound economic life, and the constant growth rate of the city's and the surrounding area's population make betterment a certainty...
...this is the American Dream, and the Dixons of this country are supposed to be the places where you can still believe in it...
...He decided it ought to be turned into a sort of shrine, and he used his own paycheck as a first down payment on the building...
...We'd stay here, probably be married eventually, live in a house, and I'd work a job I know I'd have tomorrow...
...It seemed right, too, when after the service, the entire congregation trooped down to the basement for a potluck dinner...
...From my own experience I had to agree...
...Around a bend and down the road, an old black water tower dripping with icicles rises above a factory...
...Reagan's claims to the contrary, they are concerned about security...
...The For Rent signs are everywhere...
...Working or not working—that's the big issue right now...
...Grubic belongs to a new class of young people fleeing the frozen, depressed North, seeking Sunbelt jobs...
...But a new porch has been added to the front of the house, built by unemployed carpenters from Dean Frey's union...
...A visitor doesn't sense much confidence of that kind in Dixon today...
...It is a damned noble organization...
...The world has changed so much that it frightens me...
...I don't believe there's a factory in Dixon that hasn't been hit with layoffs," says Norma Contreras, the bookkeeper for Local 727 of the Laborers International...
...And I'm sure it must make the Lord sad, when he looks down at this world he created and sees what it's come to...
...Many stores and cafes are still open, of course, but in their windows hang other signs suggesting trouble...
...The flags of every state flapped from the lampposts...
...These are people whose lives have been stable, whose futures seemed promising, people for whom the American Dream has always made sense...
...Seems like everybody wants to leave," he told me the day before he took off...
...they look forward to baseball and fishing off the Ronald Reagan bridge in the summer, they open new businesses, they marry...
...Reagan to the top and he can't be stopped,' the Dixon High School cheerleaders yelled, piling on top of each other in a pyramid...
...We and our people are still pretty naive about what's happening in Detroit...
...StOise, where for fifteen cents one can buy a "Reagan River Rock" culled from the waters where the President once served as a summer lifeguard, or, for a few dollars, a T-shirt with the legend "jelly beans, a symbol of greatness...
...She said, "The one thing I've always wanted to do is live long enough to see a greatgrandchild...
...R-E-A-G-A-N.' " —The Dixon Evening Telegraph, November 5, 1980 On a cold February day, I set out on a sort of pilgrimage to Dixon, Illinois, the hometown of our fortieth President...
...the real attraction of visiting a town like Dixon lies in the small city ambiance of gentle manners, sylvan lanes with turn-of-the-century brick and frame houses, and the easy camaraderie that punctuates daily contact among the citizenry...
...Success without greed, industry without blight, ever-increasing prosperity for all— Associate Editor Mary Williams was born and raised in Wausau, Wisconsin (pop...
...And we're willing to work together...
...The same thing that has been taking place in small towns and larger cities across the country, and especially in the Upper Midwest: Shoppers have been heading for the canned music and splashing fountains of the suburban mall, light industries have been packing up and moving to the Sunbelt, and now, recession is speeding up the slide...
...I wondered whether the townspeople who shaped Reagan's life still believed in the American Dream, now that Reagan's policies are shaping theirs...
...They're both pretty secure in their jobs...
...But out here in the rural areas, people have been able to get away from it until now...
...Still, I almost began to believe that in Dixon I would encounter the mythical small-town America Ronald Reagan so often invokes: the picture show, the swimming hole, the handshake to close a business deal, the Stars and Stripes fluttering high over the courthouse...
...To my right were an elderly mother and her sixty-year-old daughter, whom I'll call Catherine, an eighteen-year veteran of the Dixon Development Center's laundry and kitchen...
...She does quality control work for a hardware distributor in Dixon...
...Put us out of our misery.' " But for others, there is anger, not acquiescence...
...some of the employes now facing layoffs have known secure employment for up to twenty years...
...And thousands have acted on their preference in the past few years, moving to towns like Dixon, hoping to find happiness, honesty, fair dealing, and community spirit along Main Street...
...I guess I'm better off than some people...
...the vacant Glowing Ember fireplace accessory shop where For Rent signs are taped to the windows...
...Presidential' Recipes Sought...
...the consumer spendable income rate in Dixon was one of the highest in the state...
...He has seen countless friends go for months without work, he says: "At one time, I worked with these people...
...It's getting so people are just saying, 'Close it...
...I think they'll close us down," he says...
...There was the life that has shaped my body and mind for all the years to come after...
...It's just been the last eighteen months or so that it's been really rough...
...Electing pro-union candidates was important to them, but so was bringing people together, mending a community torn by economic decline...
...I had charted my route beforehand, tearing odd items from the local paper ("U.S...
...It's uncomfortable...
...These are not construction or automotive workers, who have coped with unemployment in previous hard times...
...On the whole, the people who work here are better off than their neighbors at Lonestar...
...On February 6, the President's birthday, a flag that once flew over the White House was flying out in front of the homestead, over a sign that said "Boyhood Home of President Ronald Wilson Reagan His Formative Years...
...With two children to feed and clothe, she doesn't dare leave before then— "not unless I win the sweepstakes," she laughs...
...All of us have a place to go back to...
...This is just a guess, but I'd say maybe 30 per cent of our people are unemployed now...
...Keep America Happy, Ron...
...The answer is almost sure to be one or another variation of the word 'vitality.' . . . The city's economy has been on the upswing for years now, so much so that Dixon has one of the lowest unemployment rates in the state—less than one-half of one per cent...
...Grubic and Chupp also represent their community, where the social fabric, once tightly woven, is now beginning to fray...
...These little kids coming into the world today—what have they got to look forward to...
...It's just in the past few months that we're seeing the factories here laying people off...
...One of the angriest is Dean Frey, the forty-eight-year-old business agent for the Carpenters' local in Dixon...
...It was to be home to me from that moment on until I was twenty-one...
...The only sign of activity is a flock of pigeons that ceaselessly circles the stack...
...But go past the V.I.P...
...President Reagan may go on talking about the "land where every individual has the opportunity to be whatever God intended us to be," but they know better...
...Reagan may praise the initiative, the friendliness, the helpfulness, the intelligence of Middle America, but in a time when those traits cannot possibly put food on the table, the words ring hollow...
...By the rockets' red glare and the bombs bursting in the air, Dixon celebrated the election Tuesday night of one of its own as President—Ronald Reagan...
...Later, when I left the church in the pale February sunshine, I thought about Ronald Reagan also passing through these doors, walking down the streets, and finally going ' out into the world to say, "Today there is an increasing number who can't see a fat man standing beside a thin one without automatically coming to the conclusion that the fat man got that way by taking advantage of the thin one...
...Norma Contreras sums up the feeling: "I have two children...
...We sat on folding chairs at a long table covered with white paper...
...The frequency and intensity of the fights are increasing, he says, and so is the awareness that the personal troubles can have deep economic roots...
...They're putting them through hell...
...Contreras considers herself a religious woman and a moral one—the kind of citizen Reagan tried to lure with his conservative social policies...
...The river makes a switchback just north of Dixon, and the people like to say it's so lovely here that the river turns ****** back for a last look before heading on to...
...This is what I found: ' 'Ask any citizen of Dixon what he feels is the most important quality of the town...
...A downtown plagued by store closings, a periphery hit with layoffs—what is happening to the place where Ronald Reagan found the "good life...
...Beyond the arch is the V.I.P...
...Under different circumstances, Grubic and Chupp probably would have been one of those couples that "marry and settle down to tend the family farm or retail store...
...People here still plan their futures, of course, as they do everywhere...
...The rank-and-file working man is as honest and fair as any citizen: Give him a chance to vote in the privacy of his home, and you'll find out...
...You take a guy with a wife and kids and he can't stand by and watch a home go down the drain that he's paid for for years and years...
...The pay, the benefits you make working for the state—they weren't great...
...I can always sell things...
...Joe Grubic lived all his life in Dixon, but in February he collected his income tax refund, sold everything but his truck, paid his debts, and moved to Texas...
...Dawn Chupp stayed behind...
...But when you worked for the state, you never had to worry about being laid off...
...Until recently, Lonestar employed about 170 Dixonites, but the plant is closed now, and any plans to reopen are indefinite...
...a Beehive for Red Spies...
...You don't know how things are here, lady...
...On the highway sign at the town entrance one night somebody crossed out the town name and painted over it the word HELL...
...My mother is eighty years old...
...But you know, when you're over thirty, you don't go off and try to live with Mom and Dad...
...I was over at her house the other night...
...There's going to be violence here, and all around the country, on account of this economic thing...
...But in the past six months, families that can't seem to get along any more have come to account for about 10 per cent of the clinic's cases...
...I don't know what brought you here, but you came at one hell of a time...
...I'd like to think that some day soon, disillusioned with the Reagan "recovery" programs, the Catherines will begin to speak out for themselves...
...Dixon, Illinois, is the sort of place that would-be dropouts from urban society dream about...
...But we're going to let them know we're here...
...We'd be naive fools if we thought we'd walk into a Republican stronghold like this and turn it around," James says...
...Volunteers pointed out the room upstairs where the President once slept (since converted to a bathroom), a glass light fixture left from the Reagan days, the last remaining green boards of the original wainscot...
...And if you don't have that outlet any more, what are you going to do...
...It doesn't sound like much, but boy, it's hard to get...
...So far, the Alliance has stuck to electoral politicking—researching candidates, rounding up speakers for meetings, planning endorsements...
...Dixon is the kind of place where a transplanted blacksmith from Vermont named John Deere could strike it rich by beating a better plow out of an old saw blade...
...They muscled in on a bandstand at the intersection of Hennepin Avenue and First Street and packed the downtown saloons...
...They knew they would be hard-pressed to find new jobs, since the job service office nearest Dixon was also slated for possible closure because of budget cuts...
...Back in 1969, when the Chamber of Commerce painted its cheery portrait of Dixon's "vitality," there may have been some uncertainty about the "great prosperity" the future held, but there was also a sense of confidence...
...Though he is now running a group called the Committee to Save DDC, trying to protect his job with pickets and petitions, Nordstrom figures he'll be doing more photography in the weeks to come...
...He can"t go home and tell the kids there's nothing to eat, tell the wife there's no money to pay the gas bill...
...And it's not just the migrants like Grubic who are feeling strain on their personal lives...
...Hundreds of "victory arches" like it were raised in 1919 to honor returning soldiers...
...Some of them may have been laid off, but at least their factory is still open...
...Frey's idea did get off the ground...
...Dixon 15,700, Hometown of President Ronald Reagan...
...It was a good life...
...In the summer of 1980, a Dixon postman named Lynn Knights found out that a vacant house on his route had once been home to Ronald Reagan...
...Certainly Dixon has been pretty much immune from the effects of the economy...
...But can you...
...He's said so many times about how he comes from a poor family and all this...
...He is the recording secretary and Glen James, a teacher from Sterling, ten miles away, is the president...
...I must admit I was not sold on the idea right away...
...From there, you'll see the stone cren-elations, plate glass, and empty parking lot of Prince Castle Hamburgers...
...As Frey and James described the Alliance and their hopes, though, another goal began to emerge...
...There was a time, Frey recalls, when he had to plead with people to get them to talk with the Alliance...
...We did it all together...
...It was Helen Broderick, that fine actress, who nailed me in a corner of the commissary one day at Warner's, after I'd made a crack about having to join a union, and gave me an hour's lecture on the facts of life...
...I sweated with them...
...For Contreras, for Nordstrom, for Frey, the misty, mythic view of Dixon has little to do with the town they know...
...Some Dixonites are trying to be calm about the changes in their town and their lives...
...It's now called the Lee and Whiteside Counties Labor Unions and Public Employes Alliance...
...Frey asks...
...Fourteen months after the fireworks died away over the Rock River, I went to see whether Reagan's hometown was still cheering him on "to the top," still draped in red, white, and blue...
...There's been slow but steady growth...
...from an article on Dixon, Acquire magazine, October 1973 "Dixon is a luckier town than many...
...Store and down the hill, take the Ronald Reagan bridge over the Rock River, and stop by the patina-green statue of young Abe Lincoln staring back over the water toward downtown...
...While residing in a small town I had often heard people say what a friendly place it was, how kind and neighborly the people were, and what a fine place it was in which to live...
...With the state government looking for ways to cut costs, the DDC seemed ready to go the way of the Glowing Ember store last February...
...Swimming and picnics in the summer, the long thoughts of spring, the pain with the coloring of the falling leaves in the autumn...
...This Alliance, you can just feel it...
...A little more than an hour after President Carter conceded defeat, fireworks sparkled in the sky over the Rock River...
...Last summer, at a monthly meeting of building trades representatives, Frey proposed an idea: The fifty-one locals in the area ought to form an alliance, he said, to call attention to union issues and maybe even dilute Dixon's long-standing Republicanism...
...And it is not just the workers in the on-again, off-again construction trades who are hurting in Dixon...
...the Kinetico & Miracle Water Conditioners where the gas station used to be...
...Even in frozen February, the road leading south to Dixon is a picture-pretty, meandering route that follows the Rock River as it winds toward the town...
...Ronald Reagan, in "Where's the Rest of Me...
...Both of them are still single...
...together, they have been taking care of the two small children she has from a marriage now dissolved...
...People there may have given up in large part on the local stores, but they have not given up on their churches...
...Three years ago, I'd never have expected all the unions to work together like this," James says...
...She is twenty-six and he is twenty-one...
...I don't want to go on unemployment, because that only lasts six months...
...Larry Prindaville, the center's director of clinical services and a lifelong Dixon resident, says that until recently such problems were rare...
...Human Rights for Colombia," and from a Polish visitor...
...But I think most people know that was such a long time ago he's forgotten how to be poor...
...By the thousands they roared, shoved and swayed to a cacophony of rock music on First Street...
...I felt he was not sincere about a lot of things he said," she confides...
...If they once saw this small town as a haven of peace and security, the current downturn has changed their minds...
...day-today, face-to-face contact—one can still find all these in Dixon, but one also finds disillusioned people who have been roughly shaken out of their dreams...
...a union seemed unnecessary...
...All of that still exists, Reagan says, and while critics may sneer at his words, many of them still buy into the idea...
...For many outsiders...
...Many people work to escape their families...
...the Mississippi...
...I never thought in my whole life I'd have to worry about being unemployed," he continues...
...They hang out shingles as lawyers, doctors, engineers, schoolteachers...
...I drove pilings with them...
...When the rest of the world is booming, we're not particularly affected...
...After five days of gloomy talk with Dixon residents, the sermon on Job seemed oddly fitting...
...Illinois Governor James R. Thompson did announce the DDC's certain closure a few weeks later...
...The place stands empty and silent...
...But she shakes her head when she thinks of his pitches for God and country...
...But I was thinking they all seemed to be snagged in a system that was taking the life of this little community on the Rock River out of the hands of the people who live there...
...The first thing a visitor sees on the outskirts of Dixon is the tall, red-and-white striped smokestack of the Lonestar cement works rising above the farmlands...
Vol. 46 • April 1982 • No. 4
