Small Town Characters

I was raised on a cattle farm in a very rural part of Missouri.  A lot of people talk about how small their home towns were, but I don't know many people from a smaller community than the one I grew up in.  The nearest town had a population of 104 (1970 census).  I went to school in the county seat, which only had 1090 people.  Both of those numbers are significantly smaller now - the farming economy has been tough on the area.

Small towns have their own unique personalities.  For instance, if you drive through southwest Wisconsin, you will find nearly every little community has some kind of animal statue there.  I don't understand why they have these statues.  They are not real large - maybe between six and ten foot tall.  I guess it is just a part of their personality.

One day some traveling salesmen came into my hometown.  They were looking for a public phone, so the owner of our only store sent them to the city park where there was a phone booth.  This was long before cell phones!  They drove downtown and parked close to the phone booth.  There was a small gas station across the road from the park where the farmers used to congregate and play dominoes.  This story came from the domino-playing farmers that watched the scene unfold.

You could see these salesmen in their suits looking around the town and kind of laughing about the "hick" community they were in.  As they were digging in their pockets for change outside the phone booth, one of the neighborhood characters came by.

We had a young man in town who fancied himself as an inventor.  Larry was always nailing two things together that had never been nailed together before.  His project that summer was a homemade, 2-wheeled pony cart.  It was made by fastening an aluminum lawn chair to two bicycle wheels with a couple of poles sticking out of the front to hook up to his shetland pony.  He liked his cart so well, that he had equipped it with an AM/FM battery-operated radio hooked up to a 9-foot orange fiberglass antenna. The domino guys reported that the city slickers stared in disbelief at the contraption as Larry drove his chariot by the park.  They looked at each other and grinned, then shrugged their shoulders and continued to count their change.

The salesmen found enough change to make their phone call, and one of them entered the phone booth just as Clyde came driving by.  Clyde was a retired lawyer and he still dressed the part.  He loved 3-piece suits and those fancy hats that businessmen from the big cities often wear.  But Clyde had a problem - as he got older, his eyesight got worse.  The DMV took his drivers license away because of his poor eyesight.  So, Clyde drove an old tractor everywhere he went.  You can picture Mr. Douglas from Green Acres driving a tractor down Main St. and you will have an accurate picture of what these salesmen saw that day.  The two salesmen chuckled a little bit and pointed at Clyde after he had passed, then finished their phone call.

Tommy was our local welfare case.  He spent most of his energy avoiding work and trying to determine how to get more money out of the welfare system.  He was friendly, but just not the high-energy type.  At this particular time, he had a scheme of trying to pull a "Cpl. Klinger" by saying he was not all there "upstairs."  He wasn't wearing a dress (this time) like Cpl. Klinger did in MASH, but he came walking down the street wearing insulated coveralls with a winter coat, insulated overboots, and a winter hat with the earflaps pulled down.  The temperature was around 95-degrees that day.

The domino-players reported that these salesmen watched Tommy walk by with astonishment clearly on their faces.  They jumped into their car and their tires were squealing as they flew out of town.  Maybe they had recently read "Deliverance" or something!

I love my home town.  It is a simple life filled with friendly - and interesting - people.  I really don't think the people were all that different in a small town as compared to a larger city, they are just more visible and everyone knows everybody.

Genesis 1:27 tells us, "God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them."  Larry, Tommy, Clyde, and the salesmen were all created in the image of God.  That tells me that none of them were better than the others; they are just different.  We often judge people, but we shouldn't do that; God is the ultimate Judge.  We should leave the judging business with Him.  We should enjoy the diversity of the people that God brings us into contact with and love each one as He loved us.  How boring would life be if we were all the same?