I was born in the 1950’s in Mason City, Iowa… the town that produced Meredith Wilson, the creator of the Broadway Musical, The Music Man. Yes, River City in The Music Man is Mason City. So I was born into a unique Midwestern farm-town heritage where swindlers came to town and saved the day with music and an eleventh-hour change of heart. I was born into the land of Chmielewski Fun Time on the black-and-white TV, Lawrence Welk champagne accordion music, and the Beer-Barrel Polka, courtesy of loads and loads of German ancestry. I am that unique crossbreed of Scandahoovian and sqare-headed Deutschmann known by the only slightly racist term of Iowegian.
Corn Country!
Land of Long Winter and the ice-storm breezin’ down the plains.
And if you ask an Iowegian if he loves Iowa, he will answer, “You bet!”
And if you ask a northern Iowegian the same thing, he will say “You betcha!”
Iowans talk funny, don’t you know…
There are still corner stores and farm supply stores, though they have gone to brand names now, like Casey’s, BP, and Tractor Supply Co. You can still find HyVee and Safeway grocery stores. There are still a precious few family farms that haven’t been swallowed whole by big corporations and agri-businesses. If you go to the county fairs, you will still find kids showing the cattle or pigs that they raised for 4-H projects, and if you go into the barns after the auction, they are still producing tearful kids hugging and kissing that calf that won a red ribbon and now has to be sold… and they will never see poor Barney or Moo-berry again…
It is the land of the lonely gravel road… the back-street cattle pen… the Saturday night tornado (nearly every Saturday in Spring)… The VFW and the Lion’s Club Fish Fry at Lake Cornelia….And it is a place where most everything reeks of the past and old ghosts and times long gone, soon to never be remembered because there’s no longer anybody around who is old enough to tell the stories that grandparents and aunts and uncles used to tell. I not only miss it desperately, but I feel deeply saddened by the loss. Would I like to go home again?
“You betcha!!!”
Catch a Falling Star 
When I visited Gary, Indiana in 1998, I thought it would be like it was in “The Music Man”: Victorian houses and white picket fences. Boy was that a fantasy! I was so disappointed that Gary was instead a good place to get murdered.
Mason City still has Victorian houses and white picket fences… but it also has a lot of poverty, and practically every little town back home has shrunken and shriveled like tomatoes left too long in the Texas sun.
I’m sorry ):
Is it out if the realm of possibility?
Well, Thomas Wolfe did say you can’t go home again. That is because “home” is a place that still exists only in memory. My family still owns a farm, but it is farmed by the corporation who rents it. Most of the farm places I knew as a boy are gone, plowed under for more corn and beans. Iowa has become full of retired people and Hispanic farm workers, while most of the people I grew up with are dead or moved to California (slightly better than being dead). For now I still have kids in school in Texas… and promises to keep. So, I will go home one day… but maybe only by having my ashes scattered over the Iowa River.
I’m sorry your home has changed so much. There’s always a certain comfort knowing you can return home and see the people and places that once shaped you. I hope your memories are all positive and help fill that place you miss.
Honestly, I intend to fill several books with memories and stories of the home I once knew. It has become my reason for being.
In many ways it’s true when they say, “you can never go home again.” But, the one thing no one can remove, is the way you remember it.
In some ways, the memories are the only “home” there is.
I know what you mean Michael, and that’s unfortunate, but at least we have them to remind us. :O)