from Clara City Herald

To the Editor


The “Yock Mansion” came down last week with a few mighty swings of the huge excavator's arm. It is now a pile of rubble and will soon be a filled hole in the ground somewhere. What it represents is likely to enter the All American memory hole, described by Chicago interviewer Studs Terkel as the “United States of Alzheimer's”.


That house was the most present reminder of an era that once was. Earlier, in my parents' generation before during and after WWII the individual shop keeper needed to cope alone with huge suppliers for price and availability of goods. Gordon Yock and others changed that by developing the idea of a cooperative buying service that would secure not only a better price, but guarantee availability of what was needed for a number of rural stores. This practice persisted during at least the first half of my life in this rural area.


But more. The presence of those buyers' children in the school I attended here in the fifties and sixties shaped me. Some of those families were academically oriented, which was itself encouraging for a shy bookish country kid. And all of them demonstrated the possibility of a life filled not just with unending work, but the real possibility of enjoyment of life and surroundings. That example led me to expect more of my farm than my father did.


That era is replaced with Wal-Mart and Target, Menards and Home Depot, Best Buy and Office Max which serve as a giant vacuum cleaner, taking whatever wealth is available in rural Minnesota and sending it to places like Georgia and Arkansas. And that is why it is so important that the reminders we have around town of that former time not disappear down the memory hole. Our move toward big box retailing is a move toward poverty and away from opportunity in rural Minnesota. We need to fight against Terkel's “Alzheimers” because if we ever decide to try for a local economy again, one that does all of us some good, we are going to need to know some of what worked at a time in the past, so that we can find our way back to that kind of economy.


And what can be said of the “Subway” we get in exchange? I will only say what I know, which is that the bread sold there will not be baked in the local bakery and the meats used will not start on farms like mine.


Jim Van Der Pol
Kerkhoven