RIVER CITY JOURNAL: MY HOMETOWN USES GRIT TO MAKE ECONOMIC COMETBACK

When the shoe factory closed, it was quite a blow, but the town found ways to produce new jobs and a bright future.

You don't hear too much about my favorite hometown over in the Ozarks west of here, unless there is something tragic like a quadruple homicide or something bizarre like UFO sightings.

Fortunately, murders and UFOs don't happen every day. Instead, life goes on in my favorite hometown. Babies are born. Men and women go to work. Teachers toil in the classroom. Traffic grinds to a halt on Main Street, thanks to that newfangled stoplight. Somebody dies. Night falls. A new day.

Most small towns probably have the same complaint. Nobody pays attention to the routine of everyday life. CNN only wants to know when the local high school awards a diploma to a billy goat. As far as I know, this hasn't happened in my favorite home town. Yet.

It just so happens my favorite home town has a very ordinary history. It was officially organized in 1855, and the only reason anyone remembers the date is that folks were looking for something to do in 1955 and decided to hold a centennial. Between 1855 and 1955, the town watched the comings and goings of churches, retail businesses, sawmills, railroads, banks and drugstores.

One of the biggest things that happened was the construction, by the U.S. Corps of Engineers, of nearby Clearwater Lake. This flood-control project was designed to keep the runoff of spring rains in the Ozark hills from interfering with crops in the flat Bootheel fields. Of course, the lake doubled as a good place for bass and crappie and catfish, so pretty soon a lot of visitors started going to the lake. Most of them had to drive right through my favorite home town, but, being from St. Louis, they didn't always see any reason to stop at the hardware store or the dime store on Main Street.

Not too many years after the lake was finished, Brown Shoe Co. opened a factory in my favorite home town. This created quite a hoopla, because jobs were scarce and families needed to be fed.

I remember almost every detail of the open house at the shoe factory when it was ready to start production. Brown Shoe employees handed out hot dogs and soft drinks and doughnuts -- all you could eat, and you didn't have to ask your parents first. And there was an unlimited supply of Buster Brown comic books too. Maybe there was some other stuff for grown-ups. I don't remember that part.

For nearly four decades, the shoe factory was the major employer in my favorite home town. Then it closed.

Unless you have lost a job, it is hard to imagine having a steady paycheck for years and years until, suddenly one day, you don't have a paycheck. Hundreds of people were affected by the factory closing, not just the employees. All those businesses where workers spent their paychecks felt the impact immediately.

Did my favorite home town, like so many others in recent years, dry up and blow away? Not on your life.

That's why it was a pleasure to see the story this week about my favorite home town on the front page of this newspaper. A positive, uplifting story about a town that said (I'm putting words in folks' mouths now), "If we don't do something for ourselves, who will?"

Lots of people started working on ways to get new jobs in my favorite home town. A visible figurehead for all this activity was the town's mayor. Although I've never met the mayor, he keeps getting re-elected, so he must be doing something right. What I can tell you about the mayor is that every time he runs for re-election, he lists his qualifications and accomplishments in my favorite hometown newspaper. Among them: "I'm a pretty good crappie fisherman."

How many politicians do you know who can make such a claim and not make it sound like puffy boasting? Folks see that the mayor claims he's a pretty good crappie fisherman, and they say "Yup" and get on with their lives.

You can tell my favorite home town is booming. I've been giving you hints for months: Automatic teller machines at the banks. A McDonald's. An honest-to-goodness Chinese restaurant. The stoplight on Main Street. New schools. A new building for one of the clinics (that's right, there are two medical clinics in my favorite home town).

One of the banks has built a grand new building at the north end of my favorite home town where two highways make a Y and turn into Main Street. The bank has colonial-style architecture. It is a big building, and very impressive to look at. There are law offices there too.

The new bank building sits where the parking lot used to be for Brown Shoe employees. The imposing structure seems to dwarf the big factory building that was a mainstay of the local economy for so long.

There must be a message there. I'll leave it up to you to decide what, if anything, it says.

~R. Joe Sullivan is the editor of the Southeast Missourian.