Description

It’s been 58 years since I left my hometown of Waterville, Minnesota. It’s been 65 years since I graduated from Waterville High School. It’s been 83 years since I was born at Waseca Hospital. Those are many years, but it seems like less than a year since I marched in our Declaration Day parades, worked at Dudley’s Red Owl, and caught Backman’s chickens with a long-handled wire chicken catcher. I am happy to share my reflections on what Waterville was so many years ago when I walked its streets.

Waterville is not very different from other small towns in the Midwest during this era. As you read through the pages, reflect on how similar your small town is to Waterville. Does it bring back memories of years gone by, when you walked the streets of your hometown?

My Hometown is a continuation of recollections about growing up in a small southern Minnesota town, not unlike many small Minnesota towns of the 1950s and 60s. We all had one local movie theater and a cafe where teens met after school and after football games. We all had our favorite place to swim, hunt and fish. We had stories to tell about kids going steady, who got a new old car, and what was the latest hit on WDGY, a Minneapolis radio station.

Time passes, and before long these pages will represent the silent voices of yesterday. Years will pass, new stories at a different time will replace these stories, and people will wonder what it was like to live in a small town that, as storyteller Garrison Kelliher put it, “a town that time forgot.”

But that’s life. We return to dust, but I am thankful that humankind has a way of recording the days that time forgot. This is what this book is all about. It’s all about recording those moments in a very small piece of time when kids could be kids without the stresses of iPhones, AI, and computers. It was a good time to live. It was a great time to live. I hope this brief look back at yesterday will forever capture how beautiful this time was and what it meant to all of us.