A STROLL DOWN MAIN STREET
IN HIS CENTENNIAL YEAR, WHAT WOULD SINCLAIR LEWIS SAY ABOUT HIS
OLD HOMETOWN?

Author: By Jack Thomas, Globe Staff

Date: Tuesday, August 27, 1985
Page: 11
Section: LIVING

Life in towns like Sauk Centre had been portrayed as sweet and good until Lewis demolished the myth in 1920 with the publication of "Main Street." With Sauk Centre as a model, Lewis characterized small-town life as stifling and culturally deprived, and as America embarked on the Roaring '20s, "Main Street" became a metaphor for ignorance, prejudice and small-town smugness.

To find out what Sauk Centre thinks about Lewis, reporter Jack Thomas spent several days there last week. If Lewis had been alive to accompany Thomas on the return flight from Minneapolis, the following conversation might have taken place.

Attendant: Flight 46 to Boston has been cleared for takeoff. Capt. Johnson asks that you make sure your seat belts are fastened and that all smoking materials are extinguished. Following takeoff, flight attendants will be serving drinks.

Lewis: What do you think?

Thomas: I think I'll have a gibson.

Lewis: No, I mean what do you think about Sauk Centre?

Thomas: Oh. Well, I'm a city boy, and I'd never live in Sauk Centre, but I think you were a bit rough on folks there. I found them thoughtful and hospitable, and I liked them.

Lewis: Oh, God. You don't mean that. Where are your standards? The ambience is stultifying, the architecture ugly and the people boring. All they do is gossip or talk about their kids or drone on about how Sauk Centre is the greatest little town in the world, and they think they're involved in an intellectual exercise when they read an editorial in the Sauk Centre Herald about cow dung.

Attendant: Can I get you gentlemen a drink?

Thomas: A gibson.

Lewis: A double.

Thomas: I know. I read your book, and you're right on some points, wrong in your conclusion. It's true that a lot of people in Sauk Centre waste their time on Madonna and "The A-Team," and maybe they don't read as much as they should, but they're not much different from people in New York or Boston, and you might be surprised to learn there are folks in Sauk Centre who debate your work, and some agree with Hemingway that you're overrated.

Lewis: Are you aware that Faulkner thought "Main Street" might be the greatest American novel?

Thomas: I am. But Hemingway called you a jerk.

Lewis: He was jealous. Where did you stay in Sauk Centre?

Thomas: Well, you'll be horrified to hear there's a Sinclair Lewis Motel near the interstate, but I stayed downtown at the Palmer House, where you used to be a clerk, and I spent a night on the town with the owners, Al Tingley and Dick Schwartz.

You should have been there. We all went drinking at the Tic-Toc Bar across
from the hotel, and heard some great Artie Shaw on the juke box, and Kathy Oschwald - she runs a nice gift shop on Main Street - well, she was walking past the bar when she heard Bunny Berrigan playing "I Can't Get Started With You," and so she wandered in and we all danced and told funny stories, like the time Kathy threw the wash into the dryer without realizing that the cat had jumped into the dryer, and when the wash began to heat up and tumble around, well, you can imagine what a bloody scream the cat let out.

Lewis: If they sent you to Sauk Centre to write a story about me, what are you doing drinking and dancing and telling stories in the Tic Toc?

Thomas: I'm coming to that. Well, about 11:30 that night, Dick says, "What do you say we go out to visit Sinclair Lewis' grave?" And I said, "Sure," so we went back to the hotel and Dick got a flashlight and we drove east to the cemetery one mile out of town, which Dick says they call the Last Ride, and being at the edge of the prairie, it was spooky.

Picture this. It's midnight, and chilly, and the moon is slipping in and out of the clouds, and a dog is barking off in the distance somewhere, and Dick, who grew up in Sauk Centre, he's describing how he had planted a lot of people in this cemetery when he was an altar boy, and so there we were, holding the flashlight overhead, stumbling among the tombstones trying to find your grave, and I remembered reading about your funeral that icy day in February 1951.

The temperature was 38 below zero, and as they opened the urn to pour your dust into the ground, a few ashes were swirled aloft by the prairie wind that chases itself across the flatlands and down main streets all through the Midwest, and well, you don't have to be a poet to catch the symbolism that the spirit of Sinclair Lewis seemed restless even in death.

Anyway, Dick finally found your grave, third row in, sixth from the road, and - you're not going to like this - but your grave is decorated with plastic geraniums. What surprised me was the simplicity of your stone marker, which says: "Sinclair Lewis, 1885-1951, author of "Main Street." Nothing else. No mention about the Pulitizer Prize or the Nobel Prize or the other 21 novels. Just "Main Street," as though Sauk Centre can't think of you in any other context.

Lewis: Is the Palmer House as dreary as ever?

Thomas: Not at all. The Palmer House is a trip back to the '40s, and they know how to make their guests comfortable. In the lobby, old men sit in stuffy armchairs under stained glass windows, and for dinner, there's wine, homemade rolls, roast beef, mashed potatoes and fresh vegetables that have not been zapped by a microwave, and strawberry shortcake and coffee, all for less than $11, and the dinner music is often Glenn Miller.

Lewis: That doesn't sound so bad.

Thomas: They tell some funny stories, too. Dick was happy one night when an elegant woman registered, figuring she'd give the place some class, but a few hours later, he found her running up and down the corridor drunk and naked. One afternoon, a well-dressed man checked in from Fargo, N.D., went to his room, and an hour later, strolled through the lobby dressed in women's clothing. When word got around town that a transvestite had made a reservation for dinner at the Palmer House, business improved remarkably.

Lewis: That sort of thing happens all the time in New York.

Thomas: But when it happens in Sauk Centre, it's funny.

Lewis: Who else did you talk to?

Thomas: Well, Tom Oschwald, who works at the movie, said that he started reading "Main Street," but got bored and quit it.

Lewis: A philistine.

Thomas: You'd have loved the editor of the Herald, Roberta Olson. She think's you're a genius. She's read 16 of your books, and vows to read the other six by the end of the year.

Lewis: Commendable.

Thomas: Roberta says you would have been more popular if you had been a basketball coach and gone to the nationals. Here it is in my notes. She said, ''There was a coach named Lou Barley who was from Sauk Centre, and he took the team to the state tourney one year, and well, everybody for all time knows Lou Barley and where he came from and what the team's record was and how many years he coached. But literature's a different thing."

Like a lot of people in Sauk Centre, Roberta worries that her children are attracted to the flamboyance of outsiders. At a shopping mall in St. Cloud, her daughter saw a Mohawk haircut, and liked it. "The world is big and bad," Roberta says.

After seeing her daughter's name in a magazine, a man tried to strike up a correspondence, but Roberta discovered that he was a convict. "The world is full of wackos," she says.

Lewis: These stories are making me nostalgic for Main Street.

Thomas: Listen, if Sauk Centre drove you crazy in 1920, it would drive you crazy in 1985. It's easy to make fun. There's no running water at the airport, and when it rains, you have to walk a quarter mile in the mud to get to the
runway. The mayor had not read "Main Street," and he skipped the banquet in your honor last February and went bowling. The newspaper runs stories about Girl Scouts selling Peanut Butter Tagalongs, and when reporters come to town, a Herald reporter interviews the big-city reporter. This is dairy country, but the restaurants give you nondairy creamers with strange chemicals, and like Roberta says, if you can't pronounce it, don't ingest it.

It's a small thing, but at Waldoch Jewelry store, they don't put grates across the windows at night, and they don't even take the jewelry out of the display window. They don't have to.

People have mixed feelings about Sauk Centre. "I'm torn," says Al. "I love it here and I hate it, but Dick, my partner, says the quicker we get out of this (expletive) town, the better." Dick's problem is the loneliness. "It can be excruciating," he says. But people are lonely in cities, too.

Folks here are not trendy. You won't find Mohawks or Madonna lookalikes on Main Street. These are farmers, family-oriented, who live the rhythm of the seasons, and while they may not be the most articulate representatiaves of American culture, they're as much a part of it as folks from Central Park West.

They're not frightened by psychiatry, machinery, Easterners or women. They do fear God, though, and they think most Socialists ought to be hanged. There are signs of political progress, though. The Republican Party is no longer considered the most important institution in Western Civilization. In fact,
Sauk Centre voted Democratic in the last election.

Lewis: Maybe there's hope.

Thomas: People have forgiven you for the rudeness of "Main Street." They remind a visitor of an essay in which you contradicted "Main Street," saying
Sauk Centre was a good time, a good place, a good preparation for life. Although you died in Rome alone except for the nuns attending you, people here point out that you asked that your ashes be brought home to Sauk Centre. The contradictions prove that like everybody else, you had a problem reconciling your ideals with reality.

Lewis: You're making me feel nostalgic.

Thomas: Home towns are like mothers. Everybody has conflicts about them.
Sauk Centre is still a land of dairy herds and exquisite lakes. The public library is still housed in an old building that's sufficient, but unattractive, and the new city hall is as grotesque as the old one, which you said was the color of liver. Folks here still look forward to hog shows at the fairgrounds, and there's an opening for another team in the Thursday Nite Ladies 9 p.m. Bowling League, and Kathy Uhlenkamp is Miss Sauk Centre this year, and Froz-N-Foods in in first place in the women's softball league, and Liz Golnitz won a prize for the best feeder pig, and the saloons still smell of stale beer.

The skyline is still dominated by silos and steeples. The soil is as rich as ever, and farmers produce amazing amounts of corn and soybean and dairy products. Main Street is still an architectural hodgepodge, only today it's burger stands and pizza parlors mingled among Evelyn's Beauty Salon and Al's Barber Shop, and folks talk about the things they always talked about, births and deaths and new automobiles, and the weather and the writing of Sinclair Lewis.

Lewis: It is nice to be remembered.

Thomas: Well, Salinas, Calif., has Steinbeck, Hannibal, Mo., has Twain, and for better or worse, Sauk Centre has Sinclair Lewis. You made someplace out of no place. Main Street is now designated by oversized signs that say, ''ORIGINAL MAIN STREET." Third Avenue, where you lived, is now called Sinclair Lewis Avenue,. and guides conduct tours of your house. There's a park named after you, and the high school team is the Main Streeters.

Sauk Centre has been invaded this year by reporters from newspapers, magazines and television, and it is ironic. They set up electronic dishes on Main Street, and what they're bouncing off the satellites and around the world are the same thoughts from the people of Sauk Centre that you ridiculed.

The Herald says the centennial is just a "down-home celebration, and not an academic sort of affair," but there's been a commemorative stamp, and a cake decorating competition and a placemat contest and $1,000 in prizes for the best short stories, and discussions about you at the library and parades and a formal ball is scheduled at the end of the year, and there are Sinclair Lewis hats and T-shirts and plates and souvenir coins and a bronze bust by somebody I never heard of named Joseph Kiselewski.

Lewis: I don't know. I was never one for hometown boosterism, and all of this sounds like buffoonery.

Thomas: Well, it's America.

JTHOMA;08/12,17:04 LDRISC;08/27,22:31 THOMAS27