Small towns the focus at March 9 Gazette forum

My world growing up until junior high, when my family moved, consisted of about 16 town blocks, although a few homes were beyond that grid. And there always was the country, where a lot of my friends lived on farms.

That world was Farmersburg, Iowa, population then of 250, and it was big enough to play baseball incessantly with my friends, fight with my friends and then make up, ride my bicycle, go to the creek and fish, go to the library where my mother was librarian, see my grandparents who lived in town, get ice cream or a bottle of pop, go to church, take piano lessons and get a newspaper route.

Certainly, we'd leave town. Movies, doctors, barbers, hardware stores, grocers and the like were in places like Elkader and Monona, although we went to the locker in Farmersburg a lot for meat, small grocery items and for my dad to shoot the breeze with the local butcher. Prairie du Chien, Wis., qualified as the nearby city.

For a while when I was growing up my dad was the chief of the local volunteer fire department. A big benefit of this high position was that our phone had a private line, instead of the party lines others in town shared in the early 1960s if they didn't want to pay extra for the private line. And on our phone with the private line was: the button.

Never, under any circumstances, are you to touch the button, my dad always warned my brother and me. The reason: the button would touch off Farmersburg's fire siren, he said.

My brother and I always were getting into trouble for something when we were kids. OK, I use those words loosely. I always was getting into trouble for something. But never in either of our young lives did we cross that line and give in to the temptation to push that button.

I thought about that time in my life as I read Michael Perry's book, "Population 485." Perry's book is about his experience as a firefighter and first responder after moving back to his small hometown of New Auburn, Wis., and is this year's selection for the Linn Area Read program.

Perry has a down-to-earth way of noting how seemingly exotic jobs that get romanticized in popular media are done by regular folks. New Auburn, population 485 when he wrote the book and up to 562 when the latest edition came out, is one of those places populated by regular folks.

The Gazette will continue its tradition of hosting a public forum on the Linn Area Reads topic this coming week, on Tuesday, March 9. Instead of holding the forum in Cedar Rapids, though, we are going to Lisbon.

I'm going to write about this in my Sunday Gazette column. In the meantime, I invite you to join us at 7 p.m. on the second floor of the Lisbon Public Library, 101 E. Main St.  Regular folks will be there to talk about their experiences:

• The Rev. Tom Mattson, pastor at the Lisbon United Methodist Church.
• Lisbon Fire Chief Joe Long.
• Lisbon Mayor Rex Cook.
• Iris Cook, a retired preschool volunteer and Rex Cook's wife.

Mary Sharp, senior manager of news content, for The Gazette, has pulled this forum together. I'll be the moderator.

Obviously, most of you will not be able to attend. But at least you could grab a copy of the book and read it.

If you don't want to read the book, you should remember that no matter where you live, whether in an urban area or small, rural Iowa, regular folks are doing extraordinary things that include risking their lives at times, in order to make you safe. They are your local firefighters, medical emergency responders, law enforcement officers and other emergency responders.

An excerpt

From "Population: 485/Meeting Your Neighbors One Siren at a Time

By Michael Perry

Publisher: Harper Perennial

Do you know how to tell if someone is dead for good? The distinction, if I may understate, is critical. And yet isn't always easy to tell. Sometimes you have to bust through a door at four in the morning and find someone who might be dead, or might not. Do you start CPR? Or do you comfort the family and call the coronor?...

... So. We are given the responsibility of calling death by name. With our own hearts in our throat, we look for the signs, make the call. But here's the kicker: Despite the training, despite the onus of the decision, we are not granted the authority to pronounce an individual dead. As soon as we decide someone is irreversibly dead, we have to summon the coronor to make it official."