RIVER CITY JOURNAL: MY OLD HOMETOWN REMAINS FAMILIARLY DIFFERENT

It's easy to see the changes when you have been away, but how many of the natives can see the subtle variations on a theme?

My favorite hometown in the Ozarks west of here is changing again. It had only been a few weeks since my last visit, but a quick trip last weekend included some surprises.

Not that my old hometown hasn't been full of surprises recently. After nearly a century and a half of unimpeded driving from one end of town to another on a stop-free Main Street, a stoplight was added. This was during the same year the town got its first ATM, Chinese restaurant and McDonald's. On the other side of the coin, Toney's Drug Store, a fixture since the last century, closed its doors for good.

This past weekend, an imposing new bank building thrust its white-columned neo-Southern Colonial profile over the Y-intersection at the north end of town. It is as big, if not bigger, than the old grade school farther south on Main Street.

By the way, the old grade school is long gone, and over the past year the nearby old high school was razed. Last weekend the void was filled with a new elementary school of red brick. Some evergreens have even been planted along the new school's walls on the street that goes to my mother's house.

Since my mother lives at the north end of town, a visit there often means I never see the rest of the old hometown, which would require making a special trip through the main business district all the way out to the Y-intersection at the south end of town. Sometimes this happens when we go out to the lake just to take a look. Or we go out the other way at the Y and head for the farm on Kelo Valley where I grew up.

There are fewer and fewer magnets that compel me to go farther than my mother's house these days. The farm and the lake, of course, are the strongest. No need to pine for a thick chocolate malt at Toney's anymore. The modern, sprawling new school complex on the highway into town has no drawing power whatsoever, since it didn't exist when I was in school.

I have learned over the years by visiting a lot of small towns around the country that the people who are least informed about the ordinary particulars of the place are the natives. Sometimes it takes a newcomer or a returning native to spot the dramatic changes that can occur even in a place so slow-paced as my old hometown.

For example, I wonder how many of the servers at the new McDonald's, mostly teen-agers with shouting hormones, could direct a tourist to the site of the old college that Sam Baker started. I was taught when I was in school that it was the first formal education available to blacks west of the Mississippi. Baker later served as governor and had a state park close to nearby Patterson named after him.

I wonder how many of the clerks at Wal-Mart know the history of Lon Sanders Canyon or realize the significance of Clark's Mountain, whose peak stands north of town like the giant head on an octopus-shaped body created by the town's valleys.

I wonder how many folks are left in my old hometown who even remember Kelo Valley or Greenwood Valley or Shady Nook School or Oak Grove Baptist Church or Black River before the Corps of Engineers dammed it up.

I wonder if anyone remembers why an area of my old hometown is called Government Village to this day, even though there isn't a speck of government trappings.

How many of them know about the old railroad roundhouse down by McKenzie Creek where steam locomotives were turned to pull their loads back to St. Louis?

Do you think very many people in my hometown remember when the grocery store was downtown and was the center of social and commercial activity on a Saturday, when the town swelled to triple or quadruple its population as merchants catered to farm families buying everything from cattle supplements to cotton work gloves at the old mercantile that wrapped every purchase in brown paper tied with strong cord?

In truth, I know the answer to my own questions. Meanwhile, down at the McDonald's, the soon-to-be teachers, lawyers, doctors, sawmill workers, secretaries, factory workers, welfare recipients and teen-age mothers and fathers are saying what has been said in my old hometown for decades: There's nothing to do here. Nothing ever changes in this dinky town. I can't wait ... .

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