Rodin's Debutante by Ward Just Read Free Book Online Page B

leading to the usual asymmetric results. My father believed our town was not quite whole.

    NEW JESPER'S SITUATION was attractive. When the great glacier retreated in millennia past it left an escarpment straight as a ruler for twenty miles. Below the plateau—"down below the hill," we called it—were railroad tracks that ran from Chicago to Milwaukee and beyond. We thought of the tracks as bound north because they originated in Chicago and everything north of Chicago was wilderness, more or less. We stood with our backs to the wilderness, an open door with nothing behind it but lakes and forests and small towns like our own. The open door led nowhere with its terminus the Arctic. On clear nights we saw the white hell-born glow of Chicago, an unvirtuous city prodigious in its turbulence and variety, its dash, the capital of our region, at times magnet, at times repellent. Chicago was uncomfortable as the wilderness was uncomfortable. We in New Jesper were poised between two eternities, neither here nor there. My father believed we were superior to both, being small and therefore manageable. We charted our own course, taking care always to avoid Chicago's muscle to the south and the forbidding wilderness to the north.
    This is what we had in New Jesper. Behind the railroad tracks were the steel mill and the auto parts plant and the Bing Company that made tennis rackets and the harbor that brought raw materials to those industries. And behind them was the vast gray lake with its befouled beach. The industries discharged waste directly into the lake, oil and chemicals and sludge that contaminated the water and caused fish to die. There was a suspiciously high incidence of cancer among the residents of New Jesper but that was not evident until much later. In any case, the lakeshore was littered with dead fish. New Jesper was a mill town, neither more nor less. Chicago was a mill town too, but its farsighted founders saw to it that the lakefront was kept pristine, conceiving of Lake Shore Drive as a kind of prairie corniche. The North Shore suburbs followed suit, their lakefront reserved for sandy beaches and above the beaches the sprawling mansions of meatpacking barons and merchant princes, even a cemetery or two.
    Not so New Jesper. My father liked to explain that our town was built for heavy industry, a blue-collar town with blue-collar values. Except for the Bing Company, these industries were owned by men in Pittsburgh and Detroit and the local managers were hired help along with the people who worked the assembly lines. When World War II came, New Jesper prospered and the population doubled to close to forty thousand. Puerto Ricans and Negroes from the southern states arrived to find work, and they were not always welcomed by the second-generation Serbs, Poles, Germans, and Swedes, who thought of themselves as guardians of New Jesper's hard-won way of life, God-fearing, law-abiding, prideful, and strict. When the war ended, the town began a long decline, a twilight that has lasted to the present moment. The steel mill closed. The auto parts factory moved south. Lake commerce dwindled. The harbor was converted to a marina for the yachts of the North Shore rich; their own towns did not allow marinas because they wished to keep their beaches clean for swimming and the view from the bluff unspoiled. New Jesper struggled to convert itself from heavy industry to a service economy but with only marginal success. Its workers were not trained in service and—well, it was not men's work, no sweat, no heavy lifting, no union. The downtown continued to decay as unemployment grew. None of this set New Jesper apart from any of a hundred small mill towns of the Midwest and Northeast. What was unique was the presence of the Bing Company, family-owned and staffed by men and women from the same small town in Bohemia, where they had crafted musical instruments. Bing prospered during the war, having converted to the manufacture of swagger