I went to Danvers Days last weekend with my brother Denny, sister Deanelle, and our spouses. We need a better word than spouse. I don’t know what it is. Anyway one of the spouses, Deanelle’s husband Ron, grew up in Danvers also. I’m sure the weekend meant more to us Danvers kids than to Denny’s wife Sandy and my wife Colleen. Sandy is from Los Angeles. She especially wanted a picture of herself at the tractor pull to post on Face Book for her friends.
“They aren’t going to believe where I am,” she said.
My wife Colleen grew up in LaSalle, daughter of a farmer, but her family lived in town. She didn’t get out to the farm all that often, although she walked beans briefly and knew her Dad’s tractor was green. She thinks it was a John Deere but isn’t sure.
We started at the tractor pull, which was not the flat out power contest you might imagine. It was an antique, or at least old, tractor pull. No tractors made after 1964. Without knowing the year each tractor was made I know a lot were much older than that. There was a two cylinder John Deere A that looked even older than my Dad’s, which was a 1938. They displayed a surprising amount of pulling guts, those old two cylinder poppers.
I may have lost most of my urban readers by now but a tractor pull operates with each entrant pulling the same sled down a clay track. The sled uses varying amounts of weight for each class of tractors and increases it over the course of the pull by sliding the weight forward on the sled. There’s physics involved. I can’t explain it more. But the contest becomes how far the tractor can pull this heavy load. Most bogged down, lost traction, or just plain died around 250 feet. You wouldn’t think it would be entertaining but it was.
None of the old tractors had cabs you see. Old tractors being open and simple machines you could see what the driver was doing to extend the pull, increasing or pulling back on the throttle, braking one side then the other, patting the fender, leaning back in the seat as if doing so would put more weight on the rear tires. It’s nothing like the relationship between a farmer and a horse, but there’s something going on there. I love those old tractors, and I developed a feeling for the mostly old guys driving them.
At the tractor pull it rained, and we took shelter in the new township shed north of town. It’s nice and big. Their trucks look new too. Larry Hartzold was there, one of my Aunt Lou’s stepchildren, who we always regarded as cousins. I’ve always liked talking to Larry. He’s direct. I was just about to say farm people are more direct but come to think of it many of them are as roundabout in their thoughts and speech as the rest of us. But not Larry.
“So where you living these days Larry?”
“I’m trailer trash, living in a park on the South Side of Bloomington.”
“I believe they call them mobile homes these days Larry. You’re being kind of hard on yourself.”
“Not this place. When I moved in the park used to be decent but over the years it’s gone to hell. Trailer trash describes it perfectly. If I could find another lot somewhere I’d hook on and pull it out of there in a minute.”
Among various topics discussed were relatives and acquaintances from long ago, I would bring up a name and Larry would give me a short recap on each of them. Without naming names it went like this.
“So how about (so and so), didn’t she marry a guy that was kind of antisocial?”
“No, she married a guy who’s a dick.”
“I was kind of thinking that but didn’t want to say it.”
“Well I’ll say it for you. He’s a dick and still they stay together.” I learned a lot from Larry in the short time we talked.
Danvers Days is a series of events built into a single weekend, none of which are blockbuster, all of which put together are very nice. In addition to the tractor pull was a talent show filled with kids, little girls mostly, singing and dancing, shy in front of the small crowd. There was a Neon 5K race run after sunset with glow in the dark necklaces for the runners. They had at least one band each night, a community sale filled with hard to even describe let alone name items, a parade, food at the tractor pull put on by the Lion’s Club, a Saturday night pork chop dinner at the fire house, Italian beef sandwiches sold by the Industrial Youth 4-H club, home baked pie and cake by the Lutheran church, Carl’s Ice Cream, craft booths in the empty lot by the Presbyterian church. You get the picture. Small town community festival.
The boy scouts helped serve the meal at the fire station, built where the old community hall used to stand. The volunteer fire department is very proud that seventeen of their number are being certified as paramedics so they can continue to offer ambulance service to the town and surrounding area. That’s quite a commitment, with the ongoing training and all, for no pay.
Danvers is not as small as it used to be. I’ve been telling people for fifty years Danvers was a town of 800 and come to find out it’s up to 1180. Bob Yoder says a lot of people figure it’s over 1200 now. 1200. Woo. In a small town brag of sorts he says Danvers is doing well, while nearby towns like Stanford are dwindling. Danvers still has a tavern (there’s another just outside of town at the Y intersection) a gas station that sells a few groceries and will cook you one of their frozen pizzas, a bank and the library. Despite that new homes are being built. It’s a place to live, not shop. Being close to Bloomington Normal and the Mitsubishi plant, and lower home prices, is an advantage.
“I really wish we had a Casey’s,” Bob said.
We saw Bob Yoder at the pork chop dinner along with Patty Bergstrom. Patty Bergstrom became Patty Yoder fifty some years ago, but she’s still Patty Bergstrom to us. They live on the farm place at the curve north of town where Yoders have lived for as long as we know. While we were there I saw one of the Lemons boys, Bob and Marion Hartzold, and JoAnne Bratt. The faces were old but familiar. I found I knew the families but not the individuals. How does that happen? At the tractor pull my brother in law pointed to a man standing next to him and said
“I bet you don’t know who this is, do you David?” I peered into the man’s face trying to make something register and failed, but only partially.
“I’m not certain, but I think he’s a Bostic.” He was. He was Mike Bostic, who used to ride the bus with me. The Bostic boys if I remember were Steve, Mike, and Bobby.
I can’t name all the people I saw from the past. John Nafziger rode his motorcycle to the tractor pull and talked to me until it started raining. Jeff Melick and his wife Bonnie were cooking all weekend for various groups. Denny Grieder showed up, who I have see just once since we graduated together in 1969, in a class of twenty seven. Larry Rapp, my old battery mate who caught when I pitched in high school, was there looking and walking just the same as always. I found I could tell families, especially the Yoders, by their walks. I saw a kid in the park who both walked and looked exactly like Steve Yoder did in 1968. He gave me a start. I saw Bill and Claudine Deterding who are about to celebrate a 65 year anniversary. I saw Carolyn Kaufman, not Bob’s wife the younger Carolyn Kaufman, Bill’s wife, who used to live across the road from our farmhouse. Bill would take me with him to check his trap lines early on winter mornings when I was a kid. He was one of our boy scout leaders.
I saw Kurt Glaser, who brought his Mom Carol over to the fire station to see me. She lost her husband Bob not many years ago, but still lives on the place west of our farm on a blacktop off Route 9. While she and Bob were renting Grandma and Grandpa’s house across the road she gave birth to twins, one of whom had Down syndrome. That boy now lives semi independently in a group home in Bloomington and is doing just fine.
“Your Mom helped me so much through that. Nobody knew anything about Down syndrome back then. Your Mom talked with me every day, just giving me moral support. I was alone with those kids when Bob worked and it was so hard. I don’t know what I would have done without your Mom.”
The old names in Danvers are Yoder, Otto, Kaufman (with both one and two m’s), McClure, Hartzold, Detweiler, Weinzerl, Schieber. Some Irish but mostly German. Some Catholic but mostly Protestant. Still very white and not very diverse. I’m sure that will change soon. It must bother the new people though, who have moved to Danvers, to be among the group who is “not from here.”
I saw dear women from my past. Marge Irwin, whose sons bought our farm and who went to our church, was a fixture in my childhood. She taught me Sunday School. I shelled corn for her husband, now gone many years. Marge is turning ninety and just had her second knee replaced. I was glad to see her, because I have wanted to tell her something I’ve thought often.
“Marge, you and Lyman didn’t know it, but I would have shelled corn at your place for free just to eat those hot pecan rolls you made.” That brought a big smile to her face. She’s a lovely woman.
I saw Audrey Yoder, now ninety four, who was glad to see me. Audrey has a wonderful smile. She was walking a block away to her car and carrying her lawn chair. I was able to tell her in person how sad I was to learn of her loss of her son Duane. She teared up, her eyes becoming even brighter.
“It’s so hard,” she said. “But I’m so glad you talked to me.”
Bob Hartzold shared a memory from when Henry Dunlap, a farmer like my Dad who lived less than a mile down the road, had to come to our house on the state highway to get his mail. He would stop in to the house, have coffee with my Dad, and stay half the day.
“Your Dad loved to talk,” Bob said. “He valued talk over work I think. Didn’t care if he was the last one to get his corn planted. He’d go on, telling stories, laughing, talking with Henry until your Mom would kick both of them out of her kitchen, telling them to ‘Go do something for Christ’s sake.’"
“I can hear her saying that.”
The old men and women I met in Danvers were active, sharp as tacks, kind, and engaging. They remind me of my parents. They inspire me to grow old well.
My brother Darwin makes sure he is in his camper on the Illinois River across from Kingston Mines when Danvers Days takes place. He doesn’t like the bustle, preferring Danvers when it’s quieter.
“Stay in my house,” he said. “The key is… (if I finished that sentence I would completely ruin Darwin’s simple but effective security system). So we did. Colleen and I made our way there after the pork chop dinner and did our best to imagine how it felt to be Darwin and Sheryl in the house they’ve owned and lived in since I was a kid. Despite it being Danvers Days, and the house being situated on the relatively busy Yuton blacktop, it was quiet and peaceful. Nice.
Danvers doesn’t make much news. The town folks and the people who live on farms and in the country around it change, like everything changes if you pay attention, but only to the careful observer. It’s a little town, overlooked. In it are wonderful people. We have to remember that about our country and it's small towns. They make up some of the best of us in America.
Why do we go home anyway? We go home to find ourselves as we used to be, to find the people who helped make us who we are. People told me I looked and sounded like my Dad. And here I’ve been feeling like my Mom. It’s the old guys on the tractors, the fields we walked and the roads we used to travel, the trees in the park, the bricks in the church, the sound of a voice you last heard so many years ago. It’s being present in your community. It’s finding your Dad.
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