Tumbleweed missing from half of Fitzgerald’s ‘ghost towns’
From ST, PAUL on Page 4
floods.
Aren’t you going to miss your
friends and family? I asked.
Ed was beginning to tire of this. He
was polite of course, but I stopped
expecting an invitation to Sunday
dinner.
“Listen,” he said, “St.Paul’s got a
new bank, a new library, a new post
office, a new country club, and we’re
tryin’ to get a $2 million dollar rest
home — now it’s got retarded kids in
it — but we’ve got a construction
company, employs 300 people and
has a $200,000 office downtown...”
Now hold on there Ed. Ed told me
to call his wife nextdoor and gave me
the number.
“She knows all the details, even
wrote a poem about Mr. Fitzgerald for
the Kansas City Star.”
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demoralizing it would be to be called
a ghost town before your time. If the
criterion was that you had to be a
thriving rural Kansas town not to be a
ghost town, I wondered if there were
any rural towns—in these precarious
times for agriculture — that had been
left off Mr. Fitzgerald ’ s 1 ist. And what
about the tourists who would think
“ghost town” meant, well, urn, ghost
town, and would just come walking in
your home to see how people lived
back then when, in fact, people were
living there right then.
. “Yeah, me and the wife tooled on
up to St Paul in the Winnebago last
summer and Charley, lemme tell ya,
that guy in the living room may have
been a ghost but that shotgun was as
real as me ‘n’ you.”
If 700 men, women and children
still resided in St.Paul — going to the
library to check out ‘Ghost Towns of
Kansas,’ putting around the golf
course and withdrawing from and
depositing into their bank accounts—
and if, to most any historian, the term
“ghost town” means an abandoned
town, then it was time to call up
Daniel Fitzgerald, an archivist at the
Center in Topeka.
Of the 99 towns listed in your
book, Mr. Fitzgerald, 1 asked, how
many of them actually have people in
them?
Fitzgerald admitted that almost
half of the towns in his book were
populated.
“I tried to look at the importance of
the towns,” Fitzgerald said. “St. Paul
at one lime lost 62% of its population,
went from 1800 residents down to
700. It used to be a major trading
center of southeast Kansas, but now
it’s just a country town and just serves
its residents.”
So apparently Mr. Fitzgerald
looked at where towns stood in the big
universal scheme of things. If they
didn’t build ships to sail the world’s
seas or export fine wines to some of
the world s finest restaurants, they
were ghost towns. What Fitzgerald
isn’t anticipating here, is the con
sunialc disappointment of any tourist
who goes looking for ghost towns and
finds that half of the towns in the
Kansas ghost town guide have
healthy, rejuvenated main streets,
new banks and libraries and that the
ghosts there still bang around in the
attics of private homes where they
belong.
I reached Betty Brogan next door,
told her Ed had given me the number.
Betty has become sort of the self
proclaimed head apparition of St.
Paul. Anything Ed may have over
looked in the city’s favor, Betty had
memorized.
“We’re in the feasibility stage for
getting a $2 million adult care facil
ity, and it’s not exactly good press to
be called a ghost town now,” Betty
said. “Mr. Fitzgerald says he’s been
here, but he hasn’t and if he would
have come we would have taken him
to St. Paul’s two saw mills, three
construction companies, four beauty
shops, the tavern that serves half
pound hamburgers so huge one per
son can ’ t eat them, the two restauran ts
— one with fried chicken and the
other with Mexican food every Thurs
day night — and the Mission Day
celebration we have here each May.”
“He’s trying to sell a book, but
we’re trying to sell a town,” Betty was
getting a bit winded.
“We have pecans, a state wildlife
refuge, two beautiful islands on the
Neosho River, trees and greenery...”
And then Betty read me her poem,
“An Ode to Mr. Daniel Fitzgerald.” A
few lines stuck out in the “moon,
June, spoon” rhyme scheme: “We are
busy, busy indeed...” and the
clencher, “When a dance is happen
ing at our town hall/come, and you
and the ghosts will have a ball...”
And then she read me a letter her
niece had written to Bruce Buchanan,
editor of the the nearest newspaper,
The Parsons Sun, that mentioned
more of St. Paul’s thriving busi
nesses. By this time, St. Paul was
sounding belter to me than Lincoln.
The economic crunch on these
small communities has certainly
brought with it an abundance of bad
press. A play called “Nebraska” by
John Logan recently opened in Chi
cago, and paints rural life as a breed
ing ground for psychopathic right
wing hate groups who skin children
and read scripture between shoot-outs
with the State Patrol. Now, for the
sake of tourism and book sales, small
communities who make their living
off small family farms and the folks
who operate them are being written
off as ghost towns.
Betty reaffirmed that I could in
deed come to Sunday dinner when I
saw fit, and I even heard Ed say
goodbye to me in the background,
despite my having referred to him in
the posthumous tense.
Just because I said I would, I called
Jim Potter at the Nebraska State His
torical Society.
“I know Dan, and I don’t doubt his
credentials,” Potter said. “There’s not
really any historian’s definition of a
ghost town, it’s just mostly common
sense. It’s a place where virtually
nobody lives and tumbleweed blow
down the streets.”
Lieurance is a senior English mqjor and
Daily Nebraskan Editorial page editor.
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