Time Essay: Small Town, U.S.A.: Growing and Groaning

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If such problems are not widely familiar, it is only because they have long been drowned out by the louder outcry of the cities over kindred troubles. Small Town, U.S.A., is in fact likely to be heard from more and more in coming years. In the past decade, through such channels as the National Association of Towns and Townships and the Congressional Rural Caucus, small towns have begun voicing a more concerted plea for federal assistance. By last December they had prodded the White House, long obsessed with city problems, into issuing for the first time a formal policy on small community and rural development. That act represented, whatever else, official recognition that small town America is far from idyllic.

Little towns do, of course, offer their own special allure. A small community of any one of the wide variety provides a setting for life that is profoundly distinct from the hectic atmosphere of the metropolis. The sense of warm, intimate community may not be universal

in small town America, yet it can be found. Writer Lael Wertenbaker, 71, has discovered just that in Nelson, N.H. (pop. 550). She likes Nelson for many reasons, including the fact that "in winter people know who's pregnant, and the snow-plow gets there first." U.S. Representative Wes Watkins of Ada, Okla. (pop. 17,000), chairman of the Rural Caucus, is not being merely windy when he says, "People in small towns are not numbers."

To grow up in a small town is to have not a number but a name and rank that are known to everybody, and a history too. It is to understand not how Edgar Lee Masters wrote Spoon River Anthology, but how he got his material, how he came to know the secret lives of so many so well. A small town rearing consists, by and large, of getting to know and to be known by everybody, and to feel that intimate communal familiarity as both affectionate support and unrelenting intrusion; the flight from intimacy to the city's anonymity has often been impelled primarily by a craving for privacy. The bonding that occurs when one's very history is community property is formidable and, to certain temperaments, oppressive. It is that bonding, that sense of utterly being of and belonging to a place, that makes most true small-towners more suspicious than city folk of strangers.

The small town, then, is one thing to the inhabitants who have a sense of having always been there. The town can seem quite something else to someone who is just coming in. The natives, the oldtimers, are far more likely to be polite than warmly hospitable to new arrivals. Actually, many newcomers find

themselves newcomers for years.

Two years in New Buffalo, Mich. (pop. 2,700), out of Chicago, Newspaperman Robert Zonka says that the only new close friendship he has developed is with another couple from Chicago. Still, new migrants to small towns are likely to find, if only in the lowered risk of being stabbed in a subway, the different "quality of life" that most say they have sought.