WHERE WE LIVE; WHITEWATER: ALL'S CALM IN WHITEWATER

Hansel "Hank" Williams countered a hot afternoon with cold watermelon in the shade of his front yard in Whitewater.

A combine cut clover on the Wedekind farm at the northeast edge of Whitewater.

Danielle Rose and Dylan Lands bought candy after school at the Co-op Service Center in Whitewater from secretary Pam Moore as Doyle Eakins watched. The farm service is the only business in Whitewater.

Ola Bartels, 92, has made many rag rugs over the years which she gives away.

Whitewater youngsters board the school bus to Delta, Mo., near a shelter they can use when it rains.

This railroad crossing sign, a remnant of the long-gone railroad depot where Whitewater city park now is, stands in the back yard of Elwood Ulrich.

Amber Rose watched her basketball shot at the Whitewater city park with after-school playmates Amanda Amelunke, Danielle Rose and Clark Johnson.

David Coomer took the day off from work to help his wife, Tanya, with home improvements on their first anniversary, including outdoor carpet for the front porch. Tanya said, "I told him I would help him out with his dog pen if he would do a project for me."The sun rose over Whitewater and its First Baptist Church.

WHITEWATER, Mo. -- The tank of a white water tower on the horizon is the first clue there's a town ahead.

Approaching on Route A from Dutchtown, the narrow but new blacktop cuts between the fields below on the left and the wooded hills up on the right. The corn is turning brown, with some patches of dry green left on the leaves. Some corn fields have already been harvested for silage to feed to dairy cattle. The soybeans have yet to turn, mostly. Then the land flattens out and fields on both sides carry you into town.

Whitewater, population 103.

It's the sort of town that doesn't make much news. Not that anyone is complaining about that.

Like other small towns, Whitewater has a place where people meet. In other places it might be the convenience store or the post office. In Whitewater, the Co-op Service Center is the "communications hub," as manager David Coomer puts it.

"It's the coffee shop of Whitewater, come in for their free coffee before they get their day started," he said.

People come in, whether they drink coffee or not, starting at 7:30 a.m.

On a recent rainy Friday morning, topics of conversation included Holstein cattle, mules, removing stumps, who has or hasn't planted turnips, who's putting up a Quonset building, who's taken sick and whether fields will be too wet to be sprayed after this rain.

And when you get some farmers together, it's almost impossible not to discuss politics a little. One said he fell asleep during Al Gore's acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention.

"All I heard was '$5 corn and $10 soybeans,'" said another.

"I sure slept through that."

"You sure you're not making that up, John?" said Pam Moore, the secretary.

Laughter.

This particular day, corn was $1.49 a bushel, soybeans $4.45, wheat $1.99 and milo $1.39, according to the prices marked on a chalkboard.

"Well, I'm going to check my rain gauge."

"Pour some in Frog's on your way."

"I always do."

While the co-op is the only business in town, there actually aren't that many farmers, Coomer said. A lot of people work in Cape Girardeau at places like Dana Corp. and Procter & Gamble.

But it isn't hard to find someone with an opinion on low commodity prices.

"There's a crisis out here and people don't know it," said semi-retired farmer Jay Criddle. "Farmers are taking it on the chin."

Farmers could live with the low prices, he said, "if inputs didn't hurt us so bad." Inputs like seed, fertilizer, pesticides, herbicides, tractors.

In 1950, the price for a bushel of corn was $1.35, he said, not much lower than today's price. Of course, farmers today produce many more bushels, but those bushels cost more to produce.

Back when Criddle started farming, in 1950, chemicals hadn't become a staple of agriculture. A little 2, 4-D and that was it. Then came atrazine, and others.

Without those chemicals, "I don't think we could feed the nation," Criddle said. "Chemicals took care of a lot of hands."

Whether corn is $1.35 a bushel or $5, Whitewater, like many small towns, has seen better days. Or at least more bustling days, when, according to residents, the population was four times greater. The town used to have more stores, then it just had one grocery store, where you could get gas and lunch. That one closed a few years ago.

The town had a barber shop, now gone; a bank, now gone; a hotel, now rental property. Milling companies, a butchery, a stockyard, all gone over the course of a century. Schoolhouses consolidated out of existence with the Delta district.

Whitewater used to be railroad town. And with the railroad came a steady stream of railroad bums, according to Ola Bartels and her son, Glen.

One Sunday in the 1950s the family came home from church to find a bum sleeping on the couch. He beat it out of the house quick when her husband got the shotgun (even though it didn't have shells in it). It was remembered with humor.

"Nowadays, you'd think a lot different about it," she said.

Nowadays, the train tracks are gone.

Still, in Criddle's opinion, things in Whitewater haven't changed that much.

"The names stay pretty well the same," said Criddle, who then rattled off surnames that have been in Whitewater for a century or more. But he has noticed the town is "just about out of old people."

Bartels, 92, has noticed that, too. And other things.

Some customs have changed. People don't visit like they used to, Bartels said. And people used stay with up with the sick (at 4 a.m. you get really sleepy, she said, and can hardly stay awake). People used to stay up with the dead before burial.

Now there are nursing homes. Now there are funeral homes.

But "I wouldn't know anything about living anywhere else," she said. "I like it peaceful."

Changed or the same, Whitewater goes on, like Bartels, who still makes rag rugs by hand to give away, or the 75-year-old Criddle, who still does some farm work despite breaking a hip two years ago.

"If you slow down, you die," Criddle said. "If you stop, something's going to catch up with you."