NEW IPO Logo - by Charles Larry Home Search Browse About IPO Staff Links

Illinois Issues Summer Book Section

A tale of two towns

By CHERYL FRANK

Ron Powers. Far From Home: Life and Loss in Two American Towns. New York: Random House, 1991. Pp. 337. $22 (cloth).

Cairo, Ill., and Kent, Conn.: two small towns caught on either end of a post-modern twilight zone and portrayed by peripatetic reporter-writer Ron Powers. Far From Home is an example of reportage noir, a morality play about the dark underside of small town life — the influence of its power elites and the struggles of its people to overcome and endure.

Powers knows whereof he speaks. He and his family owned a home in Kent (established in 1739, with a current population of about 2,000). He witnessed first-hand the onslaught of real estate developers and agents, the expansive greed of local magnates, the waves of Yuppies fleeing New York City for bucolic nooks and crannies, and the streams of automobiles racing toward romantic ideas of rural leisure. He was part of the problem himself, being a Kent weekender for five years. Now he helps the town tell its story.

Here, also, are the tycoons and toadies of Cairo, and, yes, transcendental heroes like Richard "Doc" Poston, who in his 70s came out of retirement as a former professor at Southern Illinois University and community organizer to save the town. Opposing Poston are the forces of evil — personified by magnate-millionaire Bill Wolter, overlord of this confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers. Wolter has purchased wharfage rights from the city and made out like a bandit, to the everlasting applause of his business ally, Mayor Al Moss.

Caught between tyranny on one hand and democracy on the other are the people. These are the citizens Poston has vowed to save, but who must in the end take up the torch and run with it themselves.

Angela Greenwell

Photo courtesy of The Southern Illinoisan

Angela Greenwell

Their struggle begins with a meeting that includes Angela Greenwell of the white establishment and Jenolar McBride, a teacher in the black community. Their agreement to attend Poston's first meeting, to talk with each other and to help the assembled group find common ground helps frame the Cairo story. It is all the more significant in light of Cairo's history of racial confrontations.

Unfortunately, the citizens' heroic efforts to overcome their troubled past do not seem capable of building their future by converting Cairo into a historic reenactment of a turn-of-the-century rivertown, replete with a riverboat, cancan dancers, minstrels and Dixieland jazz. Poston and the citizens of Operation Enterprise failed to outflank the power elite by establishing a port authority district to control the river business or by attracting money to finance the project. Powers also rightly points out that Poston's vision for Cairo, however well intentioned, could destroy the town by turning it into a commercial spectacle.

Having interviewed Poston myself and visited with several of the Cairo residents he worked with, I can testify that Powers brilliantly reveals their roles in the unfolding drama. Having talked with Powers several times when I was a Statehouse reporter, I can add that he comes across in his letters and over the phone just as he does in his book. Powers reveals through dialogue and action the motives of such diverse individuals as Larry Potts, a white minister who continues to preach in his electronic church even though he has killed a black man, and Angela Greenwell, who leaves the Cairo elite to challenge the mayor and gets thrown out of a city hall meeting. Perhaps it was unavoidable, but many in Cairo's black community who were skeptical of Poston's efforts do not appear prominently in Power's account.

Powers is not optimistic about what is happening in many small towns across America, particularly those on endangered rivers such as the Ohio, and those like Kent, which cannot control the onslaught of modernity or the influx of strangers. At one end of this postmodern twilight zone is Kent, threatened by development, so that working people who have lived there for generations are forced out because they can't pay the skyrocketing property taxes or afford the rent. At the other end is Cairo, largely depleted of its work force and subsisting on welfare.

Despite Powers' focus on such fascinating figures as Poston, Powers' presence — his decisions about when to press for information and when not to — is every bit as central to the story. Powers either uses a nonstop tape recorder, takes some of the slickest shorthand around or has a phenomenal memory. The dialogue he provides is so authentic, you could swear you were actually listening to people. At times, Powers tells us the names of every shop he passes on his way into Kent. These details bring both towns alive.

Powers, who calls himself a "town boy" from Hannibal, Mo., nevertheless has been seasoned by his big-time, big-city success as a former on-air columnist for CBS This Morning and by a 1973 Pulitzer Prize for criticism. His latest book extends his first. White Town Drowsing, which examined Powers' hometown, the site of Mark Twain's boyhood home.

Powers has given us a scary story, told in engaging style. It shows how modern problems are being played out, not in the big city, but in the small towns of middle-class America. The cases of Kent and Cairo may seem extreme, but their experience discloses the histories and the futures of us all.

Cheryl Frank is a former Statehouse reporter who has worked for The Southern Illinoisan, among other papers. She is a free-lance writer pursuing a doctorate at the University of Illinois' Institute of Communications Research.

24/July 1992/Illinois Issues


|Home| |Search| |Back to Periodicals Available| |Table of Contents||Back to Illinois Issues 1992|
Illinois Periodicals Online (IPO) is a digital imaging project at the Northern Illinois University Libraries funded by the Illinois State Library