Esther's Town

It's All Progress, One Might Suppose

It's All Progress, One Might Suppose AsI oit comCon.hly in my living mom .nd reflw on the changes I have seen take place in my lifetime and those changes that took place during the years before that, it's apparent that the Estherville of today is indeed different. The store buildings are big· ger and more elegant and the merchandise they offer is remarkable. The homes are spacious and comfortable, in settings of immaculate lawns. The public buildings are impressive. This adds up to progress . But I liked some of the old. I miss hearing the voice of the telephone operator when I become frustrated in searching for the number of someone in or out of town I'm trying to reach. That shows what an old-timer I am. The new supermarkets are nice but I liked shopping for steak at Oehrlein's meat market. We bought groceries by telephoning our order to Barbara or Glenn at Sconberg & Kilgore. A pleasant young man delivered our purchases. We settled accounts once a month. Now, when Everyld entrusts me to grocery shop for an item or so, she supplies me with a crude map of the store and even sometimes notes the aisle number where I might likely find the olives, breakfast food, canned soup, or other eatables. When I become lost in a drugstore, Mary Ann or Joyce leads me by the hand to find the insect powder, hidden perhaps behind piles of groceries, tools, hosiery , and other items that in my day were never found in a pharmacy . Certainly the modern high school building is better than the one where I studied geometry in Clara Brees's room or where I puzzled over Latin with Lucy O. Pingrey. One time a mouse got loose in John Lytle's somewhat primitive chemistry and physics lab and I heroically captured it. The new high school is better lighted and equipped, and the floors don't squeak. Even the chairs are more 236 It's All Progress, One Might Suppose 237 comfortable and the desks are engraved with fewer autographs. But I am disturbed that many of the graduates of this and other schools speak such unutterables as "he gave it to Marge and I." Latin had long been a dead language in my day but was yet useful in learning something about the declension of nouns and the conjugation of verbs. We were taught that prepositions took pronouns of the objective case, and we learned other useful knowledge about language. In this age of true-and-false and multiple-choice testing, the essay test is neglected. It is a pity that many teachers do not mark their papers for grammar as well as subject content, thus cheating their students of training they need in English. Pocket calculatots will not, I hope, displace geometry, which I loved and which I thought helped me learn to think logically. In the park, where grandfather and I ate pears, is a paved parking lot close to where I once watched tadpoles in a water fountain . A wide street runs through that section of the park where the quaint 1884 courthouse stood. The massive elms in the park are gone because disease imported from the Dutch has killed them all. The young saplings aren't big enough to shade anyone wanting to eat pears-or to watch girls. The wide street where the courthouse stood permits more autos to pass through the commercial area, but it also produces more carbon monoxide and other poisons. Twotone auto horns and motor bikes make more noise than the traffic of grandpa's time. Worth Schloeman and "Squeak" Kilgore owned the only motorcycles I remember in my boyhood. Nobody sits on the old dam to fish any more. It's largely washed away. Anyway, the fish moved out when progress arrived and more people moved in. Maybe the millions spent for pollution control will restore the Des Moines River to game fish that once lured anglers to drop bait in the deep holes. Few cities have spent as liberally as Estherville to filter wastes and to remove the smell of sewage from the noses of its residents. That fight is being won at enormous expense, but other pollution along the river still persists. It has been a long time since we have had to light a candle or a kerosene lamp. The city-owned power plant and a grid of connecting transmission wires assure uninterrupted light and energy...