Welcome to Forgotonia

A new photo essay about small-town America,

“Empty places. Empty spaces”

by my good friend and amazing photojournalist Kent Kreigshauser,
(a former colleague from my days as a reporter for the Galesburg Register-Mail, where Kent continues to rock.)

This photo at right shows the former Wal-Mart, which sits gapingly empty right on the main drag (Henderson Street). The new Super Center is just a mile or so away, on the edge of town. This building has been empty for several years now.)

For my non-local readers:  Galesburg was the birthplace of poet Carl Sandburg. If you own a Maytag appliance, it was more than likely built in Galesburg, before the town lost the major Maytag plant to Mexico several years back.

This photo essay gives a bleak but honest picture of what’s going on in a lot of Forgotonia (and the country in general).

Check out Kent’s photo essay here.

Here’s me remembering the goat named after The Gloved One, if ya wanna read/ take a listen.

Check out some of my other radio essays here.

The following was originally aired as a commentary on Tri States Public Radio, the NPR member station for Macomb, IL.

(Listen to the audio version online on Tri State Public Radio’s web site)

Every summer during fair season, I want to be a kid again. But it has nothing to do with cotton candy or riding rides. It’s the kids in the livestock barns. When I see little girls who know how to lasso, I want a re-do of my own childhood.

I had every opportunity to develop farm-cred. My parents put me and my sister in 4-H. And I actually lived on a farm, unlike the rest of the kids in our club, which was called the Peppy Peppers.

But the town kids, somehow, were the ones who showed hogs and cows come fair-time.
Me? I did Drawing. And Photography.

My sister didn’t show animals, either, but she did crochet and counter-cross-stitch her way to the state fair. The best I ever did was a blue ribbon for a latch-hook rug but I made it from a kit I bought at Ben Franklin. (All my 4-H work, I made sure, could be done in front of the AC and the TV.)

Dad must have begun to notice his daughters were getting away from the fundamentals of farm life. Because one day he came in for supper announcing he had a surprise for us.

We ran out into the front yard, me hoping for a new 10-speed. Or a pool.

But it was a goat. A little black billy goat.

And instantly, it charged at me. It was being affectionate, but I screamed. “Get it off me!”

My sister laughed. She thought it was cute. So we’ll say she was the one who picked out his name.

Dad came outside with an old Pepsi bottle he had filled with milk and topped with a gray rubber nipple. He got hold of the goat, tipped back his little head, and gently yet forcefully got it to suckle.

I guessed it was kind of cute (standing still).

Later, there was a knock at the kitchen door. (That’s a big deal when you live out in the country.)

Mom went to see who it could be. But no one was there.

She was still looking out when there was another knock.

“Wait a minute.” Mom peered down through the top half of the screen door. “Aha!”
Michael Jackson had gotten out of his pen and was bashing his little head against the metal.

“It’s the goat!” we giggled. “You’re so silly, Michael Jackson!”

Later in the summer, my sister and I had an official chore: to rub a stinky ointment on the goat’s head twice a day. I guess it was like goat Orajel for horn cutting pain. Or maybe horn control.

But we couldn’t get it on him. It was impossible to get him to stand still. He was like a four-legged, black-furred junebug, banging constantly against his pen and against the kitchen door, because he always got out.

Soon, Dad was the one doing horn-deterrent duty.

We didn’t have him a whole summer. Did we even have him a full month? I think Dad finally foisted him off on our cousins, who were also farm kids though I’m not sure why they were expected to do better at keeping him in his pen than we had.

Now I realize the Michael Jackson episode was a foreshadowing of the poor excuse for a farmer’s daughter I was to become. The few times I was ever asked to do chores like walk beans I whined my way out of them.

I could have learned a lesson about raising animals, a small step in keeping our family’s farming tradition from fading away. But what I really cared about was getting into town, where my friends had cable, so I could watch MTV.

The next summer at the fair, I showed not a cow or a sow but a comic strip about a little girl who tries to get out of doing her homework.

These days, I regret that I never learned any of the 4-H skills that would come in handy in real life. (Last time I checked, you can’t latch-hook a button back onto your blouse.) But I have to accept the fact that when I was actually in 4-H and had the chance to learn about farm life, it just wasn’t me.

I guess I couldn’t help it any more than Michael Jackson could help not wanting to stay in his pen.

What I really wanted was to moonwalk, not walk beans.

I took these pics in Industry, IL, (McDonough County), on a trip home from the state capitol in Springfield.

See more of my Forgotonia pix on Flickr or on my Photography page.

As I reported recently, my house is being encroached upon by critters—raccoons—and I’m trying to ward them off via …closet freshener.

I went to Wal-Mart on Sunday and bought a $5 box of mothballs, then promptly returned home and tossed handfulls of the stinkbombs under my desk. I took the last hand-full and placed them strategically around my tomato, pepper, and zucchini plants.

Take that, I said, brushing my hands together in satisfaction.

But now my entire house reeks of mothballs—both inside and out— and the neighbors probably think I’m [more] nuts [than they already do].

And guess what.

When leaving for work this morning, I emerge from the house to find none other than TWO fresh swirly piles of poop on the deck. Right up next to the house.

I think these things are looking in my windows at night and watching me sleep.

The other night, I was sitting at the table eating dinner–at 7 p.m. to be exact, and that’s important because it was still bright as day outside–when I heard a scratching at the screen door.

My cat, the divine Ms. Sally O’Mally [who likes to kick and stretch and kick] is constantly using the [nasty-looking] vertical blinds [that I really, really need to clean but don't know how to take down/am too lazy to figure out how to mess with] as scratching posts of sorts, so without looking up from the newspaper I was reading, I swatted in the general direction of the screen door and said, softly, “Knock it off, Sal.”

A few minutes later, it happened again, and again I muttered, “Quit scratching” and did another absent-minded swat.

Finally, the third time, I turned toward the screen door to physically pull the cat off the blinds.

But she wasn’t there.

She was across the room, curled up a chair.

Something was on the other side of the screen door, scratching to get in.

Carefully, I approached the door and pulled back the blinds. And there sat the fattest, most complacent looking raccoon staring up at me from the deck.

“Blehhh!” I hollered, completely startled (and, then, afraid the thing had rabies or something, since it was out so early at night and so unafraid to come up so close).

Then again, word on the street—literally, as in, amongst the few neighbors in my little villa—is that an old lady who used to live here until she died a few years ago used to feed raccoons in the neighborhood.

Not to speak ill of the dead or anything, but… thanks, lady.

Anyway, I clapped my hands and stomped and made other idiotic motions, but it still just sat there, looking at me with big dumb eyes.

This little scene repeated itself a few times, and then the fat little beast lumbered away–and then scurried underneath my deck.

Where I’m afraid it is now living.

Before this episode, I’d already been wondering if there wasn’t something furry trying to make a home a little too close to mine.

Twice this spring I found little piles of swirly-looking poop on the deck, and it was right up against the house, so whatever left it there was obviously feeling comfortable.

Then I found a perfectly paw-sized swoop taken out of one of the pots in which I’m attempting to grow tomatoes. (Last year, something—probably this same little booger, who knows) stole the one tomato I was able to successfully grow.)

I wasn’t that concerned about the raccoon taking up residence under my porch until I mentioned it at work and someone said, “You better hope it’s not a female. You don’t want her having babies down there.”

Another person at work suggested that I place mothballs under the deck. Apparently raccoons don’t like the smell any more than we do when we are given the Guest Linens at Grandma’s.

But now I can’t decide what to do.

First of all, the moth balls I have on hand aren’t really moth balls, but little packets of lavender-scented moth-ball-like tablets. Which, frankly, seem a little too expensive to drop between the slats on my deck.

So do I make a Wal-Mart run for actual, cheap-o, stinky mothballs? Or would it be just as expensive, with gas prices, to run to the store for this, when the lavender ones would be just fine? Is the moth ball trick even going to work?

And aside from my own annoyance with errand-running… I suppose the bigger question is, what if some other, dumber animal tries to eat the mothballs? I’m still feeling guilty enough, as it is, about my recent roadkill incident.

And if something died down there, I’d really be screwed.

…and a 1,000-point bonus prize to anyone who knows where McCall is. (Why am I giving points away today? I don’t know. But it just feels right. So: lemme see some game.)

See more of my photos of the region on my Photography page or via Flickr.

(The following originally aired as a commentary WIUM/WIU Tri States Public Radio) on  Jan. 29, 2008.)

Commentator Alison McGaughey asks: when hip-hoppers are the predominant performers in Western Hall, has the culture changed, or have you?
–

Last fall a friend of mine, who is attending Western to work on a biology degree, asked if I’d go with her to a concert in Western Hall. Iwas so excited at the thought of live music that I yelped “Sure!” before asking “Who’s the band?”

“Um, actually it’s like a rapper guy? T-Pain.”

I instantly regretted that I had agreed to go. “Uh… T-what?”

“He’s sings ‘I’m in Luv Wit a Stripper’?” she said.

Okay.

Just to provide a little context?

The last performer I saw in Western Hall was the very white, very British, Elvis Costello.

And while ‘Costello’ may not be a name known in every household, his billing in Western Hall wasn’t anything out of line with the solidly popular, mainstream acts that have graced the stage in Macomb over the decades—like Bill Cosby and Johnny Cash to name a few.

Not exactly cutting edge.

So I couldn’t help but feel more than a little panicked when, for the first time in my life, a performer was playing in Western Hall I had never even heard of—a disturbing sign that I have probably slipped into the other telltale signs of clueless-ness that come with age, like still wearing the same hairstyle from your senior portrait after your 10-year reunion has passed.

Or not thinking twice about strapping on a fanny pack before going out in public.

When I saw his posters on campus, I discovered that T-Pain was written not T. Pain, as in, “T” as an abbreviation for “Tom,” but T-hyphen Pain.

English major that I am, I wanted to read into that hyphen: T-as-signifier. What kind of pain did it stand for? “Tooth pain”?

For the week leading up the concert, I was nervous.

What on earth, I wondered, does one wear to a hip-hop concert?

And how does one…behave?

Because to me, “concert” has always signified such cultural mores as the Banging of the Head, the Raising of the Lighter, the Strumming of the Instrument known as ‘Air Guitar.’

What happens at a hip-hop show? Were we, I feared, going to be expected to dance?

So, shamefully, when my friend called and said the concert had been cancelled—something to do with Mr. Pain’s getting stuck in an airport somewhere?—I was relieved.

But then, a few months later, I got an e-mail from a fellow graduate student inviting me to attend another show in Western Hall, something being advertised as a “loop fiasco.”

It wasn’t until I saw a helpfully visual ad in the Western Courier that I discovered this loop–actually not l-o-o-p but l-u-p-e Lupe Fiasco— is not a what but a who. Another name that needed a bit of analysis.

Not long after T-Pain missed his show here, I was surprised to hear his name brought up on NPR.

It turns out those of us who have never heard T-Pain’s music are in a minority

The story explained that his songs have been downloaded as Ringtones in record-breaking numbers. Not only because they’re catchy, but because of something to do with the fact that they’re nicely fit for today’s technology, due to T-Pain’s use of a vocoder—you know, that thing Cher uses.

Now I’m trying to look at this whole…‘fiasco’ as a much-needed educational experience.

Recently, when I heard a grad student reference T-Pain, I was able to play it cool and nod in recognition.

(I did, however, blow my cover. When she mentioned the name of one of T-Pain’s songs, I emitted, church lady-like, “Now what in heaven’s name are ‘apple-bottom jeans?’”)

The unfortunate fact is that, mainstream as these acts may be, and relieved as I am to at least now know who they are, I have no desire to listen to their music, let alone pay to see them live.

I suppose this cements my status as the fogie being mocked in that old ad campaign, “If It’s Too Loud, You’re Too Old,” but it just doesn’t sound like music to me. It’s too manufactured. Vocoder-vs.-guitar will always be, for me, a losing battle.

But next time a hip-hopper comes to Western Hall, I might just shuck out the bucks and go—if only to prove that I can leave the house without a fanny pack.

–

(White Christmas at my family’s farm, 2008)

Check out more of my photos of the region on my Photography page or via Flickr.