The little Iowa town where all my hometown novels are set is based on the little town where I grew up and spent all of my school years from Kindergarten to Senior Year of High School. I call it Norwall. It has all the same letters in it as the town of Rowan, the real town behind all my farm-boy fantasies. I also added an “L” for love and an “L” for laughter. All these stories, whether written already or still percolating in my demented bean, are set in this little town.
The school building where I went to learn through the sixth grade was gone after the 1980’s. But the gymnasium with its theater built in still stands and is used as a community center to this day. It was here where I had my first crush, where I first saw a girl naked who was not my relative, where I was deeply embarrassed during the square-dancing lessons in Miss Molton’s Music Class, and where I told such big black hoo-haw lies that I truly got the proper training I needed to be a story-teller.
This isn’t what Main Street really looked like to me. I saw it in the 1960’s and 70’s. This is the 1950’s, when the artist who created this blanket was in high school. But It contains the world I knew. The water tower is missing, but the fire station and post office are there at the far end of the street on your left. The grocery store, the cafeteria with its George’s Malt Shop sign, the Brenton Bank building, and the hardware store are there on the left. The town hall and V.F.W. is on the right hidden by the trees. You can just see the steeple of the old Congregational Church that was torn down and moved to a new location during some of my earliest memories of the street.
This is what it looks like now that the hardware store is gone. The bank and the cafeteria have been updated and changed. The water tower has changed from silver to blue.
The Methodist Church, built in the thirties and torn down in the eighties, was an important part of my boyhood. It was a place where my faith in God was nurtured and reinforced to the point that my highly active and existential mind could never truly turn to atheism and doubt. It was also the place where a Methodist minister took the time to explain the facts of life to me and helped me overcome the terrible secret I kept inside me about being molested when I was ten. In more than one way, my life was saved in this building. I miss the place terribly.
So, here it is, the town that made me who I am and provides the background for the most important thinking and writing that I will ever be able to do.
