(Op-ed from Peter Children)
Many of you who are in your twenties thirties and early forties have no idea of what Iowa and Mason City was like up to the late sixties and early seventies. To put it plainly it was a racist state….and this city was in the heart of it.
I grew up near the brickyards in an area then known as the Balkan Ghetto. The reference stemmed from the fact that this quadrant was heavily populated by those who emigrated from Balkan countries in Europe. I won’t name all the countries that entails because it’s not really germane to this story. Suffice to say 99% of those living there spoke two or more languages. Aside from the Balkan presence there were equal numbers of African Americans and Hispanics and we all lived together side by side quite comfortably.. My next door neighbor was African American, and my close friend while growing up was Mexican. When I attended Grant School, where Shopko is now located, there were 26 known nationalities attending that school.
Like children everywhere growing up we intermingled in our daily lives, ate in each other’s homes and somehow got through adolescence without serious trouble and entered maturity. As a point of interest, out of that Southwest quadrant of the city came more PhD’s , Medical doctors, Orthodontists and Lawyer’s per block than any other part of the city. And this was long before affirmative action quotas were implemented in universities. I speak both English and Serbian, and I am second generation, my mother was born in Mason City as was my father. I was born at the height of the Great Depression, 1934, no one had money but in our circumstances, money for daily life was not that much of a problem. My grandfather owned a half of a city block and on that land he produced all that was needed to sustain life. Huge garden, fifty chickens, two pigs, and one cow. A vast garden provided all the vegetables we needed. We butchered the two pigs at the first snow fall and smoked the meat; it was like living in a village in the mountains of Montenegro where he came from.
When I first left the neighborhood to attend Roosevelt Junior High School and started dating girls, it quickly became apparent that I along with my Orthodox friends were different. I’ll explain this as I move through the story. I got serious with a girl from Clear Lake whom I met on a summer day when I stepped into a ice cream store to buy a cone. I was very young, only seventeen and a junior in high school. Then and there I was struck by her; to me she was beautiful, I asked her out, she was one year younger than I, her parents could have been judged poor by any measure, no different than 95% of the population at the time. It wasn’t long before I became integrated into her family and she seem to fit nicely into mine. We became a couple and dated through high school and a couple of years beyond. I started a business, she went to work for a major airline in Atlanta and a plan was put into place . I paid the business off in less than a year and told her to come back and we would marry. I was making about $10,000 a year; as a comparison the manager of J.C. Penney’s was earning about $3,300.00 a year, this was during 1953 and 1954. As an added bit of information, the first person of color ever to work as a counter clerk in any J.C. Penney store in America, did not happen until 1963. (Goggle)
I was in the Cecil Theater watching a film when she had me paged. She had arrived at the Mason City Airport and wanted me to pick her up. I left immediatly to go after her and drove her to her parents home. After I brought in the luggage I immediately sensed there was something wrong, This was a home in which I was asked to cook; her father would say to me, “Peter why don’t you cook tonight, I like the way you cook.” So I would cook the meal. I went on overnight trips with this family…there was never any question as to my intentions. But on that night, a night that is forever burned into my memory, the air in the room was thick with tension. “What’s going on here?” I said. “Something’s not right, what it?” I continued. Her father scraped his shoe against the carpet and looked down, he never looked directly at me, her mother remained silent. Nancy was taken back, she hadn’t yet removed her coat. “What is it,” she said. Then her father spoke; “Well Peter,” he said, “You’re a foreigner and we do not want you going with our daughter.” The words staggered me, they hit me like a rifle shot out of nowhere. I had no time to prepare a reply, nor did I want to. I turned and walked out the door. Nancy ran after me and jumped into the front seat and said; “Drive away, we can go somewhere and talk.” “Go back inside I replied, “we’ll talk tomorrow.”
Tomorrow never came. They put her on a plane the next morning for California to her sister’s home. I never seen or spoke to her again after she left the front seat of my car. Did garlic, olive oil and the fact that I spoke another language bring me down? It might be interesting to note that in Clear Lake at that time no one of color lived in the town…..the entire town was pure white. The Surf Ballroom was there, but no African Americans could go in unless of course they were musicians.
Some years later I started dating a girl who lived on a farm Northwest of Ventura where her mother taught school. I would drive to the farm to pick her up and once there, I would always go through the back door which led into the kitchen. Invariability her mother would be in there cooking or preparing something; her father would then come into the kitchen and say; “I’m Irish and I only drink Irish Whisky.” By him saying that I do not wish to imply he was drunk because he was not. My reply was always; “Good for you.” I’d say. Then the daughter would come down from upstairs and we’d leave. Then one evening when I arrived and entered into the kitchen, things were different.; she had prepared some questions for me. (I) Do you speak a foreign language; to which I replied yes. (2) Do you eat foreign foods in your home? To which I replied, yes, but we buy the food here. (3) Are you Orthodox, to which I replied, yes. “Then” she said, “you’re a foreigner and I don’t want you dating our daughter.” Her father never came into the kitchen that night to inform me of his heritage, and their daughter never came down the stairs. …… How would you like this woman teaching your children in school?
That was fifty years ago or more, Iowa was 96% white then and still is today. In Mason City if you were African American, you had to sit in the balcony if you wanted to go to the movies. You couldn’t be served in local barber shops, you could not get served in 95% of local restaurants, women of color could not have their hair done in local salons. If you were African American , you could not rent a hotel room, and we are a long way north from the Mason-Dixon line. The Klan was very active here in the thirties and many prominent business men were members. Newspaper files record the story of a Klan meeting here where some 3,300 people attended. The largest chapter in this part of the state was in Hampton, Iowa. Yet it was Iowa who help launch Obama’s accent to the presidency….go figure.
The predjucies have been tempered now, mostly because of federal laws, but they are still under the skin and in many they are closer to the surface than you could imagine.
During my entire life, the Oval Office was occupied by wealthy white protestant men. I of course voted for Obama and supported him financially to the point I received an invitation to the inauguration, as did others in this city that know of. On the day he took the oath of office I cried like a baby because one of my life’s dreams was to see a person of color in that office before I died. I never believed it could happen, but it did and I am glad I stood witness to it.
Whether you believe it or not in Washington and in every other city and town there exists an “establishment” that struggles for dominance, or if you prefer “control” in municipal matters. These are people who like to dictate policy to the hoi poli down to the point of telling you where you can park your car. This is an illness that seems to afflict the cocktail crowd, although it’s been known to encompass a few beer drinkers as well. Mick Baker’s guest column in today’s (Sunday) Globe was a call to this crowd to oust all the three incumbents on the council this fall that are up for re-election, and the Globe was more than happy to oblige, in fact they moved his comments up from a letter to the editor to that of a guest column…..makes it seem more important than it really is.. These martini drinkers cannot get it through their head that there are more people in this town drinking in neighborhood taverns and bars than those drinking at the country club. That is why Max Weaver is on the council…because he’s one of them and so are Marsters and Nelson.
Soon it will start, the billboards will go up, the ads will start running on television and the call will go out to the Face book crowd that they are all friends. What a crock of crap that is. Do what I told you to do; study each person running for office. Look into their associations, look at who they hang with…ask yourself if you’d fit in with them. If the answer is no, then do not give them your vote. To come and knock on your door doesn’t mean they will do what you want, it only means one thing and one thing only….they want your vote and will pretty much say whatever you want them to say to get it. Do not give it away. If your vote was not precious they wouldn’t be standing at your door trying to get it. And while we are talking about that, coming to your door doesn’t make them smarter or more capable. They are who they are and knocking on doors cannot change them into something they’re not.
If you want more of what this mayor and his ilk has brought to this city….which is zero, then change the council. If not, then do not change it leave it as it is. But remember, you cannot do that unless you vote, and the martini drinkers are betting you won’t vote.
Peter J. Children|
