Word: sauk
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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...
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...
...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...
...tenant in the Roseland St. building, David Sauk, called the amendment "a chance to tell Sears, Harvard, and the other giants that we're not going to let them toy with our city any more...
...trucks and boulders. They shove welding rods into the radiators of the power companies' tractors, sprinkle sand and gravel into gas tanks. Four masked men on horseback menaced one work crew; up to 100 chanting protestors have played "ring-around-the-tripod" to heckle surveyors. Math Woida, a Sauk Centre farmer, became a local hero by picking a particularly windy day to spread manure: the stuff was blown all over a survey crew and its truck. Unamused, the power companies have filed an excessive $500,000 suit for real and punitive damages against the farmer...