Sauk Centre withstood a withering attack by its own most famous
son"and then
made him into a local hero.
BY ADAM GOODHEART
Free-lance travel writer
Preservation Magazine
When Carol had walked for thirty-two minutes she had completely
covered the
town, east and west, north and south; and she stood at the corner
of Main
Street and Washington Avenue and despaired.
Main Street with its two-story brick shops, its story-and-a-half
wooden
residences, its muddy expanse from concrete walk to walk, its
huddle of
Fords and lumber-wagons, was too small to absorb her.
"Sinclair Lewis, Main Street
That was 1920. I walk down Main Street today, in the dusk of
Midwestern
winter, and it seems small to me as well, though in a different
way,
perhaps: small as if I,d just stepped into a museum diorama, or
shrunk
myself down for a stroll among the toy houses of a model railroad
set. Life
is lived in the brightly lit windows of houses and storefronts.
At the Main
Street Café, the waitress bustles with her coffeepot among
old men throwing
dice; across the way, at the insurance office, a crewcut salesman
in
shirtsleeves chats with a client. Around the corner, at Tony,s
Barbershop,
Tony looks up from sweeping the floor and waves a greeting. In
his office,
the gray-haired editor and publisher of the Sauk Centre Herald
is working
away on a story, beneath a framed photograph of Teddy Roosevelt
hung over
the desk.
A few months shy of a century ago, in the summer of 1902, the
17-year-old
Sinclair Lewis had a job as a night clerk at the Palmer House
Hotel, just up
the block. He was preparing to leave his hometown for college,
and for the
kind of life he could never have found here, then or now: a life
of
perpetual restlessness, of literary fame and drunken parties,
the glamour of
ocean liners and the squalor of flophouses. The hulking brick
hotel is still
there today, and it,s where I,m staying; indeed, I,m the only
guest. (This
afternoon, the proprietor handed me the key to the front door,
told me to
leave a note if I helped myself to anything from the bar, and
went on her
way.) I let myself in now, cross the empty lobby, and in the pool
of light
above the old oak desk I imagine the unhappy, ugly face of that
long-dead
teenager: purse-mouthed, raw with acne, lowering his chin into
his collar as
he always did in photographs.
Lewis was a disaster as a hotel clerk. He broke things, forgot
guests,
wakeup calls, gave them the wrong change, and got fired after
two weeks. He
was, in a deeper sense, unfit for Sauk Centre, for the ordinary
commerce I,d
seen in the windows along Main Street. But he never forgot the
place"carried
it with him like a stolen wallet, and after a couple of decades
he wrote a
book about it, a satire of pinpoint accuracy, full of the righteous
anger of
a lonely adolescent. Sauk Centre became "Gopher Prairie,"
a name that pretty
much sums up what Lewis thought of it. Not since Nathaniel Hawthorne
had an
American author delivered so fierce an indictment of small-town
life: its
hypocrisies and cruelties, its well-nourished prejudices and cultural
bleakness.
Main Street is today one of the least read of the classic American
novels"perhaps because, ironically enough, the passing years
have given its
title phrase a wholesome, nostalgic glow that is entirely undeserved.
Sinclair Lewis might have discovered "Main Street" as
a place in the
geography of the national soul, but then Walt Disney came along,
a Vespucci
to his Columbus, and redrew the map in rosier hues. (Generations
of
preservationists and other well-meaning souls have followed Disney,s
lead,
not Lewis,.) Then too, America,s center of gravity shifted elsewhere,
and
anyway, in this age of the interstate and the Internet, small-town
America
isn,t what it used to be"or so, at least, declares a cheerful
video at the
Sinclair Lewis Interpretive Center, which doubles as Sauk Centre,s
Chamber
of Commerce. (A sign near the I-94 off ramp advertises these two
amenities,
and "Rest Rooms," with equal typographic weight.) Dave
Simpkins, the savvy
editor of the Herald, tells me that if Lewis went to write a satire
like
Main Street today, he,d set it among the cubicles of a corporate
office:
"That,s where America really lives now."
And yet Sauk Centre is still here. Maybe America is still
here, too. The
town appears little changed, certainly, having withstood Lewis,
leveling
attack. Its population of 3,930, posted at the city limits, is
just a few
hundred more than at the time of Main Street. The business of
the place is
still dairy farming; its leisure, hunting and fishing in the summer,
ice
fishing and sleigh rides (well, snowmobiles) in the winter. The
same
churches still stand, and the library, and the band shell by the
lake, and
nearly all the same houses, white bungalows with broad porches
and gabled
roofs. Even the town pharmacy"Perkins Drugs at the turn of
the century,
Dyer,s Drugs in the novel, Main Street Drug today"is still
at the corner of
Third and Main, though the name of Lewis, father, a physician,
is no longer
spelled out in gold letters on the upstairs window.
That intersection, adorned with one of Sauk Centre,s two traffic
lights, is
now known as Original Main Street and Sinclair Lewis Ave., the
street names
changed some years back in honor of the town,s most famous son.
The town
recoiled at first from any identification with the novel, and
then,
charmingly"though not without a bit of enlightened self-interest
at
work"embraced it. The high-school sports teams, the ones
Lewis never played
on, are now the Mainstreeters, and the Nobel-winning novelist
himself is
simply another local asset to be touted by the Sauk Centre Chamber
of
Commerce, along with the 35 miles of paved roads, three convenient
golf
courses, and 2,060-acre lake.
Yes, America still lives here. And it seems as exotic at first
glance to me,
an East Coast urbanite, as any Moroccan casbah or Mongolian yurt.
For more of this story, subscribe to the magazine or find our
March/April
2002 issue on newsstands.