In Minnesota: Birthday Bash for a Native Son

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Every 15 or 20 years someone with a note pad and pencil arrives in Sauk Centre, Minn., and asks cosmic questions: How's it goin'? What's the mood? Whither America? These visitations have been going on since 1920, when a native son named Sinclair Lewis published a best-selling satire called Main Street about a town he dubbed Gopher Prairie, which no one ever seriously doubted was inspired by Sauk Centre. Gopher Prairie was drawn as smug, suspicious and stuck in its ways, and that was a liberating vision for a newly urban America about to plunge into the jazz age. Main Street became a metaphor for a certain kind of narrow-minded, self-satisfied, credulous America; Lewis' Babbitt and Elmer Gantry completed the picture. In 1930, when Lewis became the first American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, Sauk Centre's role as national small-town bellwether was set for good.

This year is the 100th anniversary of Lewis' birth. A postage stamp will be issued from Sauk Centre this month, and in June there will be a production of Thornton Wilder's Our Town. The summer will see the annual Sinclair Lewis Days road race, beauty pageant and parade. The Sinclair Lewis Eagles Aerie and Auxiliary 3847 are selling popcorn at birthday events, and the Centennial Committee is offering souvenir T shirts, mugs and tractor hats. As Richard Lingeman writes in Small Town America: Lewis certainly would have "appreciated the transubstantiation of his indictment of Main Street into positive thinking."

The hoopla isn't all commerce; a lot of it is pride and affection. "He put Sauk Centre on the map," approved the 8:30 a.m. coffee crowd at the Palmer House Hotel. True enough. No one ever made a metaphor out of neighboring Long Prairie or Gutches Grove or Alexandria.

Sauk Centre has 3,709 people, a number that has not changed much in 100 years. Says Betty Schmitz of the Chamber of Commerce: "We want growth to keep our children in town." But two of her five have already left, following a pattern set by the young over the past century. Sauk Centre is flat and prairie plain. Despite the scattering of dairy farms and silos and little groves of trees, the landscape rolls open as the ocean right up to the edge of town. Winter lasts about eight months, and at 7:30 on Feb. 7, the birthday morning, the view from a frost-coated Palmer House window was of what a local writer, Chuck Rathe, calls glittering bitterness--a sub-zero refraction of sunrise on salt and ice and frost, sparkling through clouds of steam and smoke, the air itself turned to veils. The cold and the seeping, whistling presence they call "that wind!" are eerie and somehow ominous.

Grade-school children decorated place mats for the official birthday dinner. One contributor had drawn the yellow line down the middle of Main Street in an oblique, Miro-like style, an imaginative effort to contain its unwieldy width, its absence of definition by such amenities as regular curbs, trees or design coherence. Another, apparently in a very early grade, drew a psychic space showing the hero of the day surrounded by pictures labeled Minnesota, Pigout, The Dude, Breakdance, Camper--and a list of the National Football League teams.