These remarks were delivered to the Storm Lake United Banquet on April 17.
You realize that you have almost achieved fossil status when you are asked to review the past half-century in Storm Lake, and how it has changed. I was a junior at St. Mary’s High School in 1974. We had nuns teaching math, science and English. I miss them now in my dotage. They rapped my knuckles with a ruler. Told me to take my hat off indoors and say thank you. They taught me how to write. For that, I won a Pulitzer Prize, which generated a movie about Storm Lake that has screened around the world, most recently in Odesa, Ukraine. I have been across the country speaking about The City Beautiful for the past seven years to large crowds and small, and they marvel what this little town with a big heart has done.
It all looks so bucolic in my mind’s eye of 50 years ago. Everything could just go on, including the Corral Drive-In Theatre and Louis Henderson’s Pastime Tap and teen hops at the Cobblestone. It is a little slice of heaven in my memory somewhere in Sunset Park.
The city fathers — yes, that’s how it worked back then, and some change is very good as we now have a female-majority city council — could see that we were too dependent on meatpacking. Hygrade was struggling. Farms were consolidating. The Storm Lake Industrial Corporation was formed to attract new industry to town as a hedge on change.
I went off to college in the Twin Cities and came home with a degree to a different community. Hygrade closed. The union was busted. It wasn’t long before IBP moved in, deciding to take over pork as it had with beef. The town was at that point desperate to get that packinghouse going again.
The union boys had found other jobs. IBP opened a non-union plant offering half the peak wages of the Hygrade days with the Amalgamated Meatcutters. Refugees from Laos helped to fill the plant roster. It was the beginning of a transformation of Storm Lake from all-White to what is now an ethnic polyglot.
The Farm Crisis of the 1980s ushered out a generation of family farmers. Independent pork production was lost to consolidation over the next 20 years as swine moved indoors. Likewise, turkeys became corporate-owned as Sara Lee took over what was Vilas and then Bil-Mar. The full consolidation came as Tyson owns both the pork and turkey complexes.
Talk about change! Employment in pork slaughter grew four-fold, and employment in the turkey plant more than doubled. Storm Lake became a protein production center for the world as trade opened with China starting in 1972.
The schools burst at the seams. Gone are North, South and West elementary schools, combined in a single elementary now. South School, which was built as the high school in 1922 and in 1974 was the junior high school, has been converted into apartments. The middle school is next to the elementary, big block complexes set against that West wind.
The middle school was built just as The Storm Lake Times was launched in 1990 by brother John Cullen. I returned home to help, after plying the newspaper trade elsewhere in Iowa. That was also the year Walmart came to town. Latinos started to arrive to complement the Asian workforce. Lake Avenue was in for a big change, too. Hardware stores were replaced by quincinera shops and restaurants. The old J. Doan barbershop, built as a bank way back in the day, now serves Thai food.
Everything has changed: farming, meatpacking, retailing, schooling, even eating.
And, everything continues to change, most fundamentally the weather. Amid long-term drought and warming, we are sucking down the Jordan and Dakota aquifers beneath us for hogs, poultry, ethanol and meatpacking, not to mention human and industrial consumption. Water rates rise as aquifer levels drop. How long can that go on?
Iowa State University climate and agronomy experts warn that scorching July temperatures are bound to hamper Midwestern crop production, with implications too many and consequential to contemplate after supper.
Disease challenges concentrated livestock production. Avian flu has spread to dairy cattle and to humans. African swine flu threatens our huge hog inventory, the densest concentration of livestock in North America.
Meanwhile, appetite for pork in Asia grows.
Change swirls all around Storm Lake. Of course it is a constant. Our forebears knew it 50 years ago. They saw their job as agents and managers of change. When the Storm Lake Chamber of Commerce and the Storm Lake Area Development Corporation came together to become Storm Lake United, it continued to embrace that role. It marshaled support for school bond issues. It brought together fishermen and mechanics and bankers and government officials to dredge Storm Lake. It managed a successful bond issue for Project Awaysis, which remade the lakefront with King’s Pointe Resort. It pulled the bushel basket off our lamp and let our light shine for all to see.
We have built over the past 50 years a commercial, industrial, cultural and recreational center for Northwest Iowa.
City Hall and Buena Vista County have been willing participants and partners, but the drive to build Storm Lake has always come from private initiative. Old George Schaller brought meatpacking to Storm Lake after meeting the bosses of Nash Packing on a train ride from Chicago. His son, Harry, was one of the organizers of the industrial corporation 50 years ago. The Schallers and Ballous and Macks built Buena Vista College and kept it alive long enough for Harold Walter Siebens to endow it. Buena Vista University still needs that total commitment from Storm Lake because it is, of course, our future.
When Storm Lake was getting beat up over immigration, Storm Lake United was out front in support of our new neighbors, calling out the misportrayals and outright lies. Along with the city and school district, Storm Lake United has helped show the state how to grow different cultures together. It’s a challenging change to manage, but it is far better than managing decline. Storm Lake is the most interesting small town in the Midwest.
Storm Lake United is the one institution that can bring together the city and county, non-profit and for-profit. When the arts council went defunct, Storm Lake United picked up the Star Spangled Spectacular. It manages promotions and events. It markets Storm Lake to a wider region, if we let it. It tries to make change better.
That’s why Storm Lake United is vital.
The city and county and state all think they should play the economic development game. We have the Iowa Lakes Corridor of Opportunity that does lunch in Spencer, and we have the state economic development agency that has no solutions for our water system problems upon which thousands of jobs depend. City Hall has built its own economic development organization.
But it was private enterprise and commitment that made Buena Vista University. It was a banker who got the first meatpacking plant to come here, lured by cheese sandwiches at the train depot (indeed, those were different times before corporate welfare). It was Gary Lalone who ramrodded lake dredging. Nate Jensen is reviving the Cobblestone Ballroom, not the State of Iowa. If you left bond issues just to the teachers, we would still have class at the Hayes School.
We couldn’t have done it without you. That’s why we celebrate tonight — because the people of Storm Lake love the place and are determined to see everyone prosper. Some things never change — it is still an easy-going town that welcomes all different sorts of people, that values education and that likes to have a good time. It must be the lake. Storm Lake United, too.
Art Cullen is the editor of the Storm Lake Times Pilot in Northwest Iowa, where this column appeared. For more columns and editorials, please consider a subscription to the Times Pilot. Or, if you wish, you can make a tax-deductible gift to the Western Iowa Journalism Foundation to support independent community journalism in rural Iowa. Thanks.
The Iowa Writers’ Collaborative
Have you explored the variety of writers — now up to 48, plus Letters from Iowans — in the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative? They are from around the state and contribute commentary and feature stories of interest to those who care about Iowa. Please pick five you’d like to support by becoming paid. It helps keep them going. Enjoy:
Storm Lake has a great story to tell. Thank you for sharing Storm Lake's history with us, Art. What happened, and continues to happen, in and around your home town is a testament to all of those people who knew and know now that you must plan for the future. Well done, Storm Lake.
This is a direct quote from Republican President Ronald Reagan: July 30, 1981 — Statement on United States Immigration and Refugee Policy – “Our nation is a nation of immigrants. More than any other country, our strength comes from our own immigrant heritage and our capacity to welcome those from other lands. No free and prosperous nation can by itself accommodate all those who seek a better life or flee persecution. We must share this responsibility with other countries.”
My own comment: Any person who will walk from Honduras to Texas has the determination and courage to reroof my house or work in a meatpacking plant where wages are pushed low by the consolidation/monopolization of 4 or 5 companies who control not only wages, but also prices. The corporate monopolies busted unions and lowered wages. Immigrants were willing to accept them because anything was better than their home countries. They are being abused by the corporations they work for.
If you are not a Native American you have benefited from the courage of your immigrant ancestors.